ZFS - Building, Testing, and Benchmarking
by Matt Breitbach on October 5, 2010 4:33 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Linux
- NAS
- Nexenta
- ZFS
Other Cool ZFS Features
There are many items that we have not touched on in this article, and those are worthy of mentioning at this time simply because they are enterprise features that are available with OpenSolaris and with Nexenta. These are features that the Promise M610i cannot compete with in any way.
Block Level Deduplication - ZFS can employ block level deduplication, which is to say it can detect identical blocks, and simply keep one copy of the data. This can significantly reduce storage costs, and possibly improve performance when the circumstances allow. One group that recently deployed a Nexenta instance had originally configured the system for 2TB of storage. They were using 1.4TB at the time and wanted to have room to grow. By enabling deduplication they were able to shrink the actual used space on the drives to just under 800GB. This also has implications when randomly accessing data. If you have multiple copies of the same data spread out all over a hard drive, it has to seek to find that data. If it's actually only stored in one place, you can potentially reduce the number of seeks that your drives have to do to retrieve the data.
Compression - ZFS also offers native compression similar to gzip compression. This allows you to save space at the expense of CPU and memory usage. For a system that is simply used for archiving data, this could be a great money and space saver. For a system that is being actively used as a database server, compression may not be the best idea.
Snapshot Shipping - OpenSolaris and Nexenta also offer snapshot shipping. This allows you to snapshot the entire storage array and back it up via SSH to a remote server. Once you ship the initial snapshot, only incremental data changes are shipped, so you can conserve bandwidth while still replicating your data to a remote location. Keep in mind that this is not a block level replication, but a point in time snapshot, so as soon as the snapshot is taken, any new data is not shipped to the remote system.
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vla - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Along the lines of the "Opensolaris is kind of dead" threads, I'd really like to see an article like this for BTRFS. It's about to become the standard filesystems for Fedora and Ubuntu in the near future, and I'd love to get some AnandTech depth articles about it.. what it can do, what it can't. How it compares to existing Linux filesystems, how it compares to ZFS, etc.andersenep - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
When btrfs is ready for production use, let me know. From what I have seen it is still very much experimental. When it's as stable and proven as ZFS, I would love to give it a try. I have severe doubts that Oracle will continue to invest in its development now that it owns ZFS.Khyron320 - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I have never heard of any caching feature mentioned for BTRFS and it is not mentioned on the wiki anywhere. Is this a planned feature?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Features
Sabbathian - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Only site where you can find articles like these.... thank you guys ... ;)lecaf - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Hiwhy not do some extra testing with Windows Storage Server R2 (just released a few days ago)
I'm sure it would lag behind but it could be interesting to see how much.
Mattbreitbach - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I do not believe that Windows Storage Server is an end-user product. I believe that it is only released to OEM's to ship on their systems. At this time we have no route to obtain Windows Storage Server.lecaf - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
True its OEM only and not public but "evaluation" version is available with Technet and MSDNWithout a license key you can run it for 180 days (like all new MS OS BTW)
but you can also try this
http://www.microsoft.com/specializedservers/en/us/...
Just a registration and you get the software. (Read license because benchmarking is sometimes prohibited)
Sivar - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
BSD supports ZFS as well, and it is far from dead.Of course, it's also far from popular.
Guspaz - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
"We decided to spend some time really getting to know OpenSolaris and ZFS."OpenSolaris is a dead operating system, killed off by Oracle. Points for testing Nexenta, since they're the ones driving the fork that seems to be the successor to OpenSolaris, but basing your article around a dead-end OS isn't very helpful to your readers...
Mattbreitbach - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
When this project was started, OpenSolaris was far from dead. We decided to keep using OpenSolaris to finish the article because a viable alternative wasn't available until three weeks ago. If we were to start this article today, it would be based on OpenIndiana. Some of our preliminary testing of OpenIndiana indicate that it performs even better than OpenSolaris in most tests.