Many large-scale photo hosts start with netapp as the default "good enough" way to handle multiple-TB storage. With a 1-5% cache on top, the workload is truly random-read over many TBs. But these workloads almost assume a frontend cache to take care of hot traffic, so L2ARC is just a nice implementation of that, not a silver bullet.
I agree that RAID-DP is much more scalable for reads than RAIDZx, and this basically turns into a cost concern at scale. The raw cost/GB for ZFS is much lower, so even a 3-way mirror could be used instead of netapp. But this certainly reduces the cost advantage significantly. mike p.s. I managed the team that built blogger.com's photo hosting, and picasaweb.google.com, so I've seen some of this stuff at scale (neither of these use netapp). For large photos, it's pretty simple: the more independent spindles, the better. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
