ZFS - Building, Testing, and Benchmarking
by Matt Breitbach on October 5, 2010 4:33 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Linux
- NAS
- Nexenta
- ZFS
Demise of OpenSolaris?
You may have heard some troubling news about the fate of OpenSolaris recently. Based on some of the rumors floating around, you might think OpenSolaris is going away, never to be seen again. Admittedly, OpenSolaris has never been an open source project in quite the same way that Linux has. Sun launched the OpenSolaris project to help promote its commercialware Solaris product. Sun seemed to do a decent job of managing the OpenSolaris project, but Sun is no longer in charge. The project is now at the mercy of Oracle.
The OpenSolaris Governing Body (OGB) has struggled to get Oracle to continue to work with the OpenSolaris project. Oracle’s silent treatment has gotten so bad that the OGB threatened to dissolve itself and return control of the OpenSolaris community to Oracle on August 23 if Oracle did not appoint a liaison to the community by August 16, 2010. It is pretty safe to assume that Oracle, clearly a for profit company, would benefit more from allowing the OGB to dissolve. That would give Oracle the option to do what ever they wanted with OpenSolaris, including simply killing the project.
At this point, two possible outcomes seem the most likely. One possible outcome is that Oracle will continue to offer OpenSolaris but will tighten its grip over the direction of the project. Perhaps Oracle would use the opportunity to make some technical changes within OpenSolaris to limit the scope of the product so as not to compete directly with commercialware offerings.
The other outcome is that a fork will occur in the project, possibly resulting in several different projects. Regardless of Oracle, OpenSolaris appears to be living on through the Illumos project located at http://www.illumos.org/ - There hasn't been much activity yet in the Illumos project, but it's only been announced for a few weeks. We will be closely monitoring this to see if it will be a suitable replacement for OpenSolaris. Illumos was initiated by Nexenta employees in collaboration with OpenSolaris community members and volunteers. While Nexenta does sponsor some of the work, Illumos is independent of Nexenta. Illumos aims to be a common base for multiple community distributions. It is run by the community on a system of meritocracy. Distributions like Nexenta, Belenix and Schillix will move to using Illumos as the base for their distributions, and other distributions have shown interest as well.
Personally, I don’t think the situation is as dire as some people suggest. Oracle now owns MySQL as well as OpenSolaris, yet millions of us continue to use these products. If Oracle does over exert control to the point that it chokes off these open source products, then we can always resort to forking the code and getting behind the new open source projects.
As far as using OpenSolaris, I don’t see Oracle’s ownership as a reason to give up on using OpenSolaris. If you are considering deploying a ZFS based
A final note on the possible demise of OpenSolaris is that OpenSolaris may now be officially dead. According to an internal Oracle announcement that was posted into some mailing lists, Oracle is killing off OpenSolaris and replacing it with Solaris 11 Express. Additionally, Oracle claims they will continue to release open source snapshots of Solaris after each major release instead of releasing nightly builds, but that does not sound like a typical open source project.
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Mattbreitbach - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Indeed you can, which is one of the most exciting parts about using software based storage appliances. Nexenta really excels in this area, offering iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and WebDAV with simple mouse clicks.MGSsancho - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
or a single command!FransUrbo - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
Would be really nice to see how ZoL compares. It's in no way optimized yet (current work is on getting the core functionality stable - which IMHO it is) so it would have no chanse against OpenSolaris or Nexenta, but hopfully it's comparative to the Promise rack.http://zfsonlinux.org/
gfg - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
NAS is extremely cost effective in a data center if a large majority of NFS/CIFS users are more interested in capacity, not performance. NDMP can be very efficent for backups, and the snapshots/multi-protocol aspects of NAS systems are fairly easy to manage. Some of the larger Vendor NAS systems can support 100+TB's per NAS fairly effectively.bhigh - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Actually, OpenSolaris and Nexenta can act as a SAN device using COMSTAR. You can attach to them with iSCSI, FC, Infiniband, etc. and use any zvols as raw scsi targets.JGabriel - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Also, "Testing and Benchmarking"?Doesn't that mean the same thing and isn't it redundant? See what I did there?
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Fritzr - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
This is similar to the NAS<>SAN argument. They are used in a similar manner, but have very different purposes.Testing. You are checking to see if the item performance meets your need & looking for bugs or other problems including documentation and support.
Benchmarking. You are running a series of test sets to measure the performance. Bugs & poor documentation/support may abort some of the measuring tools, but that simply goes into the report of what the benchmarks measured.
Or in short:
Test==does it work?
Benchmark==What does it score on standard performance measures?
lwatcdr - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
I am no networking expert so please bear with me.What are the benfits of a SAN over local drivers and or a NAS?
I would expect a NAS to have better performance since it would send less data over the wire than a SAN if they both had the same physical connection.
A local drive/array I would expect to be faster than a SAN since it will not need to go through a network.
Does it all come down to management? I can see the benefit of having your servers boot over the network and having all your drives in one system. If you set up the servers to boot over the network it would be really easy to replace a server.
Am I missing something or are the gains all a matter of management?
JohanAnandtech - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
A NAS has most of the time worse performance than a similar SAN since there is a file system layer on the storage side. A SAN only manages block and has thus less layers, and is more efficient.A local drive array is faster, but is less scalable and depending on the setup, it is harder to give a large read/write cache: you are limited by the amount of RAM your cache controller supports. In a software SAN you can use block based caches in the RAM of your storage server.
Management advantages over Local drives are huge: for example you can plug a small ESXi/Linux flash drive which only contains the hypervisor/OS, and then boot everything else from a SAN. That means that chances are good that you never have to touch your server during its lifetime and handle all storage and VM needs centrally. Add to that high availability, flexibility to move VMs from one server to another and so on.
lwatcdr - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
I but that layer must be executed somewhere I thought that decrease in data sent over the physical wire would make up for the extra software cost on the server side.Besides you would still want a NAS even with a SAN for shared data. I am guessing that you could have a NAS served data from the SAN if you needed shared directories.
I also assume that since most SAN are on a separate storage network that the SAN is mainly used to provide storage to servers and than the servers provide data to clients on the lan.
The rest of it seems very logical to me in a large setup. I am guessing that if you have a really high performance data base server that one might use a DAS instead of SAN or dedicate a SAN server just to the database server.
Thanks I am just trying to educate myself on SANs vs NAS vs DAS.
Since I work at a small software development firm our sever setup is much simpler than the average Data center so I don't get to deal this level of hardware often.
However I am thinking that maybe we should build a SAN and storage network just for our rack.