ZFS - Building, Testing, and Benchmarking
by Matt Breitbach on October 5, 2010 4:33 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Linux
- NAS
- Nexenta
- ZFS
Promise M610i
The Promise M610i has been our go-to unit of choice for the last several years in our datacenter. The M610i is a hardware based iSCSI/SATA storage unit that allows you to build your own
We've found them to be reliable, inexpensive, and they perform well for the price point. Over the years we've populated Promise systems with everything from 250GB SATA drives to 1TB SATA drives and everything in between. The performance has remained relatively static though due to the static spindle count and 7200RPM rotating speed of those spindles.
The Promise systems incorporate RAID 0,1,5,6,10, and 1E (a form of RAID10 that allows you to use an odd number of drives). They are hardware controller based, and feature dual gigabit Ethernet ports that can be bonded together. It also incorporates a web-based management interface, automatic notifications, and a host of LED's that indicate power, activity, and failed drives.
For someone that is just starting out in the SAN world the M610i is a very attractive option with little experience necessary. The only drawbacks are when you want to expand the units or if you want better caching. The Promise system allows for a maximum of 2GB of RAM for caching, so if you want additional caching you'll have to shell out for a much more expensive unit. The Promise unit does not allow for adding additional JBOD enclosures. This limits you to a maximum of 16 spindles per system. We would have loved to continue using the M610i's if we could increase the spindle count.
Overall our experiences with the M610i units have been very good. We plan on doing an in-depth review of one of our M610i units at a later date to give a little bit better insight into the management and feature set of the units.
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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.