Pimping out Snakebite's ZFS... (was Re: I've got a surprise for you!)
Trent Nelson
Ted tells me you're the resident hardware guru amongst you lot. I
was wondering whether or not you'd be able to offer any assistance
on 4Gbps FC card recommendations? See thread below for discussion;
if we could coerce Sun into donating some cards, well, that would
be just super ;-)
I came across this article by Neil Perrin a while ago:
http://blogs.sun.com/perrin/entry/slog_blog_or_blogging_on
After chatting with a few of you Sun folk on #solaris/#opensolaris
on irc.freenode.net, someone mentioned that using a pair of Intel
X-25E SSDs, in a mirror, for housing separate intent logs for ZFS
would just result in dreamy ZFS performance.
I realise you guys have your new open source dev servers up and
running now (which is fantastic, by the way), but would you be at
all interested in getting involved with some of the Sun stuff we've
got at Snakebite, in particular, this ZFS setup we're looking into?
Let me know what you think.
Trent.
----- Forwarded message from Trent Nelson <trent....@snakebite.org> -----
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:13:07 +0000
From: Trent Nelson <trent....@snakebite.org>
To: Ted Leung <Ted....@Sun.COM>
Subject: Re: I've got a surprise for you!
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 03:46:25PM -0800, Ted Leung wrote:
> I'm glad to see this come to fruition at last. One notable thing I
> see missing is any kind of Mac OS X machines. I think that this
> would be a great hole to fill if possible.
Indeed, a few others have said the same thing. I've already made
an inquiry.
I think our Sun coverage is reasonable at the moment. I've got a
16 x 146GB 4Gbps disk array that I'm planning on using for Unix
and Windows home drives and general file stores.
I'm in love with ZFS, so there was absolutely no question as to
what would be providing the Unix/NFS side of things. I ran in to
a lot of problems with hardware though (funny, things off eBay
not working properly, who would have thought), so I bought a Sun
Fire v40z specifically for the role, which should be arriving at
MSU soonish.
I haven't had much luck trying to track down reasonably priced
4Gbps FC cards that are supported by Solaris -- what are your
thoughts on the likelihood of getting Sun to donate such hard-
ware? Top-notch performance from ZFS/NFS would obviously come
back and reflect positively on Sun ;-)