I've been doing a lot of reading about ZFS lately, and I'm quite enamored of its design goals. The reliability considerations are particularly attractive, and the snapshot scheme is more robust than anything I'm familiar with. I would very much like to keep my personal data in such a filesystem.
Some time ago, I caught the launch of Drobo, a USB-connected box that does some RAID-like things with drives, but without any of the RAID management headaches. It transparently grows and shrinks as devices come and go, and just presents a big LUN to the host. Essentially it's a storage appliance, and while it helps if you format it with a supported filesystem, it's OS-independent. In a similar vein, I'm looking for a ZFS appliance, either software (a VMware image?) or hardware, to confer the benefits of ZFS upon whatever machine I stick it to. It should simply share the resulting filesystem(s) over Samba or NFS (or iSCSI?), and give me a shell I can ssh into for taking snapshots, creating filesystems, and such. Doing it in a VM would abstract the hardware, eliminating compatibility concerns with JBOD controllers and such. Performance is my *last* concern, so I'm not worried about that aspect, though making the host OS do S.M.A.R.T. monitoring breaks the "appliance"-ness of the idea. Nevertheless, this is the direction I'm leaning. If someone makes a (very quiet!) little ZFS box with a prebuilt OS image on a CF card and a couple slots for bring-your-own-drive pool growing goodness, please clue me in, as I wasn't able to find it with Google. I'm not opposed to building such a thing myself, but the last time I felt friendly with a command-line, it was DOS 6. I don't know whether to start with Solaris Express Community or Developer, or NexentaOS, the FreeBSD port, or something else entirely. Am I crazy for attempting this? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
