Erik Trimble wrote:
Frankly, I'm really surprised that there's no solution, given that the *amount* of NVRAM needed for ZIL (or similar usage) is really quite small. a dozen GB is more than sufficient, and really, most systems do fine with just a couple of GB (3-4 or so). Producing a small, DRAM-based device in a 3.5" HD form-factor with built-in battery shouldn't be hard, and I'm kinda flabberghasted nobody is doing it. Well, at least in the sub-$1000 category. I mean, it's 2 SODIMMs, a AAA-NiCad battery, a PCI-E->DDR2 memory controller, a PCI-E to SATA6Gbps controller, and that's it. It's a bit of a wonky design. The DRAM could do something of the order 1,000,000 IOPS, and is then throttled back to a tiny fraction of that by the SATA bottleneck. Disk interfaces like SATA/SAS really weren't designed for this type of use. What you probably want is a motherboard which has a small area of main memory protected by battery, and a ramdisk driver which knows how to use it. Then you'd get the 1,000,000 IOPS. No idea if anyone makes such a thing. You are correct that ZFS gets an enormous benefit from even tiny amounts if NV ZIL. Trouble is that no other operating systems or filesystems work this well with such relatively tiny amounts of NV storage, so such a hardware solution is very ZFS-specific. --
 Andrew Gabriel |
Solaris Systems ArchitectEmail: andrew.gabr...@oracle.com Mobile: +44 7720 598213 Oracle Pre-Sales Guillemont Park | Minley Road | Camberley | GU17 9QG | United Kingdom ORACLE Corporation UK Ltd is a company incorporated in England & Wales | Company Reg. No. 1782505 | Reg. office: Oracle Parkway, Thames Valley Park, Reading RG6 1RA 
Oracle is committed to developing practices and products that
help protect the environment
|
_______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
