is THIS why the 6.2 release seems stalled ?

[Josef Grosch]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 09:08:03PM -0800, Jeff Mohler wrote:
> Fbsd needs SAN support before it can cope with
> virtualization..virtualization requires a lot of disk..spindles..and
> FCP/iSCSI is a great way to drive this condensation.
> 
> I mean..when you have to read this list, and see people wonder which
> end of a SAN connection owns the responsibility for fsck'ing a SAN
> filesystem, I wonder how quickly I can bone up on Linux.
> 
> In ten years at Network Appliance..wanna know exactly how many FreeBSD
> host installs ive seen besides Yahoo?
> 
> 2.
> 
> How many -non- Linux SAN configurations?  Probly 80% of all SAN I see
> and work with are Linux based.
> 
> Fbsd NFS client performance is 1/3'd that of a tuned linux box, can
> you say ../..?  If you can, you know what its like to never have a
> valid directory attr cache on your mounts.  (ick)  Automount...dont
> even go there.
> 
> Im in this for the long haul..I like Fbsd, and as long s lynx and
> apache still work on it, im happy.  As for the future..I just dont see
> much serious future there unless it grows up.
> 
> Rememer when Linux couldnt do _crap_ and Fbsd 2.5 was the bomb?  I
> do...I want like to see that again.


While I do agree that FreeBSD does need work, the big pebble in my shoe
right now is a journaling file system (try doing a fsck on a 1TB file
system), FreeBSD does do SAN right now. At work (Juniper Networks), I have
a FreeBSD 6.1-p10 system with a Qlogic card talking to a Hitachi SAN
through a Brocade fiber switch. Works like a charm. We have done tests
where we compared compiling all of our product on my SAN setup with
compiling on local SCSI disk in a RAID 10. The SAN is only 6% to 10%
slower. Considering how much easier it is to manage a farm of servers
talking to a SAN instead of each server having it's own disk array, a 10%
hit in disk performance is considered acceptable.

I have a meeting setup for Thursday to talk to your people, Network
Appliance, about SAN attaching to our new 6030 filers. The answer we keep
getting, and I'm sure this is right, is this should work like a charm. 

SAN on FreeBSD does work. The only problems we have is 1) There is only 1
card that really works. We tried LSI cards but they were dodgy 2) can't
seem to get dual channel working. 


Josef

-- 
Josef Grosch           | Another day closer to a | FreeBSD 6.1
jgrosch at MooseRiver.com |   Micro$oft free world  | Berkeley, Ca.
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