My 2nd Head

...before the end of year. In the picture below: 4x S7420 1TB RAM 4TB ReadZilla 16x LogZillas 352x 1TB SAS-2 Disks 16 JBODs

Jeff Bonwick writes about ZFS license announcements and how it rocks.

Robin Haris ( zdnet ) and Jörg ( c0t0d0s0 ) are writing about RAID6 respectivly ZFS. RAID6 will surely be a marketing success as most people do not know about ZFS, or are thinking that making the move from RAID5 to RAID6 will solve all their problems. Those companies who have heard about ZFS have certainly had a look at it. Most companies are rather conservative when implementing new technology. This is not a bad thing, especially when trusting your precious data to a new filesystem. Paradoxically, without proper checksumming like ZFS does, your data could be at higher risk, even if ZFS is a rather new technology. While there have been some problems with ZFS, none of them have affected the on-disk data. This is certainly the result of thoroughly testing ZFS like no other filesystem (leaving real-world "testing" beside). There are still some issues, that may prevent ZFS to be deployed in a broader area: -Performance issues on Storage Array with stable storage (not ignoring cac...

There is a new fix to improve performance for databases on ZFS. Can't wait to see OLTP benchmarks where ZFS is being faster than UFS with DirectIO for. Oh, and did you know there is some work going on for getting the ZIL onto seperate devices (NVRAM or Solid State Disks) (For those who don't know what the ZIL is, look here )

This was an interesting blog entry about E25Ks, DTrace and ZFS. One thing I was also thinking about, was the performance gains with ZFS clones, when running several instances of Applications using mostly the same data. Quote: "Then came a flash of inspiration. Using clones of a ZFS snapshot of the data together with Zones it was possible to partition multiple instances of the application. But the really cool bit is that ZFS snapshots are almost instant and virtually free. ZFS clones are implemented using copy-on-write relative to a snapshot. This means that most of the storage blocks on disk and filesystem cache in RAM can be shared across all instances. Although snapshots and partitioning are possible on other systems, they are not instant, and they are unable to share RAM." I had this idea, when I was thinking about using Solaris as a Xen Dom0 and running several identical (at least in the beginning) MS-Windows instances on Xen DomUs. The cloned MS-Windows images would be...