Multi node storage, ZFS

[David Magda]

On Mar 24, 2010, at 19:45, Michal wrote:

>  It's all well and good having 1 ZFS server, but it's fragile in the  
> the sense of no redundancy, then we have 1 ZFS server and a 2nd with  
> DRBD, but that's a waste of money...think 12 TB, and you need to pay  
> for another 12TB box for redundancy, and you are still looking at 1  
> server. I am thinking a cheap solution but one that has IO  
> throughput, redundancy and is easy to manange and expand across  
> multiple nodes

If you want an appliance, a Sun/Oracle 7000 series may be close:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/open-storage/

The 7310 allows for two active-active heads, with fail over if one  
dies. Does NFS, SMB/CIFS, and iSCSI; the newest software release  
(2010.Q1) gives SAN functionality so you can export LUNs via FC if you  
purchase the optional HBAs.

Unfortunately Oracle's web site seriously sucks compared to Sun's for  
product information. A lot of good weblog posts though:

	http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/
	http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/slog_screenshots  (write perf.)
	http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots  (read perf.)

	http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/sun_storage_7310
	http://blogs.sun.com/wesolows/category/Clustering

Probably cheaper in price than most vendors, but more expensive than  
DIY (though you have to add the cost of time).

Disclaimer: just a generally happy Sun customer.  (We'll see about  
Oracle though. :)