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832 TB – ZFS on Linux

jonkensy.com

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Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#81
post #24

The most important line for me was "Today, you can run ZFS on Ubuntu 16.0.4.2 LTS with standard repositories and Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage Advanced Support. That makes the decision easy." Its highly interesting that Canonical does this with ZFS. I'm not sure why they dont market this more.

I'm only a casual user of ZFS on Linux for personal storage projects, but I've spoken with people who rely very heavily on ZFS on Linux for their small businesses, and it's interesting to hear their perspectives on this. Essentially, because btrfs has failed to deliver on the next-gen filesystem front, ZFS on Linux is such a critical piece of technology that unless Red Hat has an answer soon for out-of-the-box ZFS on…

RHEL is not continuing to bet on btrfs; they are deprecating it: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#82
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. FreeBSD is just as easy to administer as Linux. Solaris I find to be a bit more challenging. I can appreciate your commentary, but I challenge you to prove me wrong. Just for some color I've ran the Gambit of Unix and Linux systems in my career with FreeBSD being one of the easiest and most consistent out of the box technologies. Solaris had already been quite the opposite. I guess you could say AIX is a…

> For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux. Was parent wrong about that point?

> Was parent wrong about that point?

I believe it was. See comment above. FreeBSD has excellent documentation on nearly every topic. Nearly every program has a manpage and there's always google to help you.

For advanced topics (CARP, DTrace, ZFS, Jails, Accounting API) the docs are excellent and you'll have to some reading to properly implement any of those anyway.

That's part of the job actually, reading/learning.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#83
post #56

Anyone else addicted to acquiring servers and high bandwidth connections ? Any ideas on what to do with the over capacity ?

ArchiveTeam is working on backing up the Internet Archive. http://iabak.archiveteam.org/ http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/g...

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#84
post #65
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly, but to any competent administrator, learning FreeBSD based on Linux experience is not that difficult. It's sort of like tasking someone to start working on a program written in Go even if they have only C++ experience. You can cope.

I get a little annoyed with this line of reasoning though. "Anyone can learn anything" doesn't help me if I need an expert now . And it doesn't magically jump the gap between "functional" (I can make a thing work in an ugly and naive way) and "good" (I can weigh the trade-offs behind the scenes and choose the optimal from multiple alternatives). Unless the assertion is that FreeBSD / Go is easy, logical, and/or obvio…

As long as you can pay. You can find anything[1].

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/commercial/consult_bycat.html

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#85
post #61

Zfs on linux and huge single servers, what could go wrong? It's like a blog written by a 22 year old straight out of college that's never dealt with a real production deployment/failure Zfs on Linux has data loss bugs. There's at least one unpatched and there are bound to be more. Single huge servers eventually fail. Maybe it'll be a drive controller. Maybe it'll be CPU or ram with bit flips as a side effect. Downtim…

I'm planning on doing a tiny ZFS pool (once I've finally saved up for it - financials can be fun sometimes!), and was thinking of doing FreeBSD for ZFS and Linux for everything else on top of Xen.

I'm currently unsure how to make Linux see the ZFS pool though. I.... don't really like NFS. It's too glitchy in my experience. I use it to listen to music stored on a different machine from my laptop, which uses a long-range USB Wi-Fi adapter. If I unplug the adapter without cleanly unmounting /nfs, I get a kworker in an infinite loop. I googled around one afternoon and discovered that RHEL apparently found and fixed this in kernel 3.x. Interesting - I'm on Slackware, with kernel 4.1.x. >.I wish you could do cross-VM virtio. That would be awesome. Then I could export the device node corresponding to the whole pool from FreeBSD and just mount it as a gigantic ext4 filesystem on Linux. (Can you do that?!)

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#86
post #61

Zfs on linux and huge single servers, what could go wrong? It's like a blog written by a 22 year old straight out of college that's never dealt with a real production deployment/failure Zfs on Linux has data loss bugs. There's at least one unpatched and there are bound to be more. Single huge servers eventually fail. Maybe it'll be a drive controller. Maybe it'll be CPU or ram with bit flips as a side effect. Downtim…

That's something I was thinking about. This thing has to go down occasionally for patches, service, maintenance. 500TB is alot to trust to a single box or two.

I'm building a Ceph cluster right now, about the same size as the one in the article, except with 9x36 drive chassis.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#88
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XFS is the de facto standard file system for RHEL deployments, they employ a lot of engineers familiar with the code and it's the default since RHEL7 came out.

Do you know if they have any of the SGI team? Like Adam and/or Mike?

Eric Sandeen works for Red Hat on XFS, at the least. Mike and Adam are elsewhere according to their LinkedIn profiles - dunno who else was working on it at SGI.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#89
post #29

What about cooling? Will the lifespan of the high-capacity platter-dense hard drives be drastically reduced by clumping them together like that with what looks like little airflow?

AFAIR from the backblaze blog, a bigger issue that shortens the lifespan is vibration.

Could that be mitigated by redesigning the chassis for slightly less density in order to fit massive rubber standoffs/grommets?

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#90
post #61

Zfs on linux and huge single servers, what could go wrong? It's like a blog written by a 22 year old straight out of college that's never dealt with a real production deployment/failure Zfs on Linux has data loss bugs. There's at least one unpatched and there are bound to be more. Single huge servers eventually fail. Maybe it'll be a drive controller. Maybe it'll be CPU or ram with bit flips as a side effect. Downtim…

Actually the real issue is, "when the system is 65% full and you reboot, how long will it take for ZFS to mount it"? Perhaps he has split up ZFS into a number of different pools and they can be mounted in parallel (depends on the init script and whether ZFS can do this). But I do recall that larger ZFS pools can take a bit of time to mount; maybe the updated ZFS for Linux is faster....

> how long will it take for ZFS to mount it?

What? How long would it take, roughly? Genuinely curious.

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