I'm just starting to learn about Solaris, ZFS, etc... It's amazing me how much is possible, but it's just shy of what I'd really, really like to see.
I can see there's a fair amount of interest in ZFS and clustering, and it seems Sun are actively looking into this, but I'm wondering if that's the right place to do it? Now I may be missing something obvious here, but it seems to me that for really reliable clustering of data you need to be dealing with it at a higher layer, effectively where iSCSI sits. Instead of making ZFS cluster aware, wouldn't it be easier to add support for things like mirroring, striping (even raid) to the iSCSI protocol? That way you get to use ZFS locally with all the benefits that entails (guaranteed data integrity, etc), and you also have a protocol somewhere in the network layer that guarantees data integrity to the client (confirming writes at multiple locations, painless failover, etc...). Essentially doing for iSCSI what ZFS did for disk. You'd need support for this in the iSCSI target as it would seem make sense to store the configuration of the cluster on every target. That way the client can connect to any target and read the information on how it is to connect. But once that's done, your SAN speed is only limited by the internal speed of your switch. If you need fast performance, add half a dozen devices and stripe data across them. If you need reliability mirror them. If you want both, use a raid approach. Who needs expensive fibre channel when you can just stripe a pile of cheap iSCSI devices? It would make disaster recovery and HA a piece of cake. For any network like ourselves with a couple of offices and a fast link between them (any university campus would fit that model), you just have two completely independent servers and configure the clients to stream data to them both. No messy configuration of clustered servers, and support for multicast on the network means you don't even have to slow your clients down. The iSCSI target would probably need to integrate with the file system to cope with disasters. You'd need an intelligent way to re-synchronise machines when they came back online, but that shouldn't be too difficult with ZFS. I reckon you could turn Solaris & ZFS into the basis for one of the most flexible SAN solutions out there. What do you all think? Am I off my rocker or would an approach like this work? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
