[SATLUG] IO-InfoOnly: Economics of ZFS, ZFS and iSCSI Integration, ZFS and Consumer PCs, ZFS vs VxFS

[Robert Pearson]

"Economics of ZFS"
<<http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/2413-Economics-of-ZFS.html>>
"Paul Murphy posted a good article about ZFS economics in his blog. He
correctly states that testing ZFS with a hardware raid controller is
nonsensical. You simple don´t need it. We build ZFS to obsolete
hardware raid. ZFS works better with direct access to the discs as the
performance bottleneck of the hardware raid controller is put out of
the equation. It would be fair to compare a Sun/ZFS system without
RAID with competing operating system with a hardware raid. From the
cost view the economics of enterprise storage will be completely
changed by ZFS."

Paul Murphy article:
"ZFS, HW RAID, and expensive mis-apprehensions"
<<http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=759>>

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Ben Rockwood - cuddletech

"ZFS and iSCSI Integration: Two Great Powers Collide"
<<http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=775>>
"OpenSolaris Build 54 is now in the wild. As of Build 53 we have an
amazing powerful new feature that will ultimately become a staple of
the data center: ZFS and iSCSI Integration. Its now drop dead simple
to start dishing out iSCSI Targets to your network, in a way that only
ZFS can provide.
---
If you didn't already know, ZFS brings the functions of a filesystem
and a volume manager together into perfect harmony."


"ZFS and Thin Provisioning"
<<http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=729>>
"ZFS is an amazing and wonderful technology. I say technology because
its more than just any one of its capabilities. Being able to dish
out, from a single pool, both filesystems and traditional volumes
(which I'll call zvol's) makes for an extremely power storage
foundation on which to build monumental structures without the
traditional complexity that comes from such beloved products as my old
friend Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM). In a world in which storage
design and management only seemed to get more and more complex, a calm
and peaceful breeze has come over the landscape and refreshed all of
us baking under the heatlamp of rusty and incapable software. Yes, ZFS
makes me happy, very very happy indeed."

" - - C O M M E N T S - -

For all of the reasons you mentioned, that's simply really exciting.
One of the futures I see for ZFS technology is in consumer PCs.
"WHAT?"
Everyone thinks ZFS is a server technology, and it is, but look at it
from a consumer point of view.
Rather than having C:, D: , etc. etc. or /vol1 /vol2, you instead have /disk.
Period.
One seamless, endlessly expandable blob of storage.
Your disk fills up, you need a new drive. Get the new drive, if you
want to keep all of your photos in MyPhotos, well, you're pretty well
stuck unless you free stuff up on that volume.
With ZFS, add a new drive, and voila! MyPhotos is now 250G bigger,
just like everything else. No copying, no soft-link chicanery, no
"short cuts". Nothing.
Combine the simplicity of that kind of management with not having to
"resize" your "old" 250G filesystem, and it makes the process of
adding storage to systems just that much easier.
That makes the "computer" part of computer just that much easier to use.
We'll get there soon, we're just at the beginning of this new phase.

Will (Email) - 12 August '06 - 16:34 "

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"ZFS vs VxFS"
<<http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/2326-ZFS-vs-VxFS.html>>
"Dominic Kay made benchmarks with filebench on ZFS and VxFS. ZFS
versus VxFS shootout shows a remarkable performance of ZFS especially
as the first public version of ZFS runs against Version 4.1 of VxFS."

Dominic Kay Benchmark article:
"Filebench: A ZFS v VxFS Shootout"
<<http://blogs.sun.com/dom/entry/filebench%3A_a_zfs_v_vxfs>>
"Here is an example of Filebench in action to give you an idea of its
capabilities "out of the box" - a run through a couple of the test
suites provided with the tool on the popular filesystems ZFS and
VxFS/VxVM; I've given sufficient detail so that you can easily
reproduce the tests on your own hardware. I apologise for the graphs,
which have struggled to survive the Openoffice .odt -> .html
conversion. I hadn't the energy to recreate all 24 of them from the
original data

They summarize the differences between ZFS and VxFS/VM in a number of
tests which are covered in greater detail further on . It can be seen
that in most cases ZFS performed better at its initial release (in
Solaris 10 06/06) than Veritas 4.1; in some cases it does not perform
as well; but in all cases it performs differently. The aim of such
tests is to give a feel for the differences between
products/technologies so intelligent decisions can be made as to which
file system is more appropriate for a given purpose."