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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L. - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
Too bad you already have the 15k drives.2) I wanted to say this earlier, but I'm quite confident that SLC is NOT required for a SLOG device, as with current wear leveling, unless you actually write more than <MLC disk capacity> / day there is no way you'll ever need the SLC's extended durability.
3) Again, MLC SSD's, good stuff
4) Yes again
5) not too shabby
6) Why use 15k or 7k2 rpm drives in the first place
All in all nice project, just too bad you have to start from used equipment.
In my view, you can easily trash both your similar system and Anandtech's test system and simply go for what the future is going to be anyway :
Raid-10 MLC drives, 48+RAM, 4 CPU's (yes those MLC's are going to perform so much faster you will need this - quite a fair chance you'll need AMD stuff on that as 4-socket is their place) and mainly and this is the hardest part, sata 6 Gb/s * many with a controller that can actually handle the bandwidth.
Overall you'd get a much simpler, faster and cleaner solution (might need to upgrade your networking though to match with the rest).
L. - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
Of course, 6 months later .. .its not the same equation ;) Sorry for the necroB3an - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
I like seeing stuff like this on Anand. It's a shame it dont draw as much interest as even the poor Apple articles.Tros - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Actually, I was just hoping to see a ZFS vs HFS+ comparison for the higher-end Macs. But with the given players (Oracle, Apple), I don't know if the drivers will ever be officially released.Taft12 - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Doesn't it? This interests me greatly and judging by the number of comments is as popular as any article about the latest video or desktop CPU techgreenguy - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I have to say, kudos to you Anand for featuring an article about ZFS! It is truly the killer app for filesystems right now, and nothing else is going to come close to it for quite some time. What use is performance if you can't automatically verify that your data (and the system files that tells your system how to manipulate that data) was what it was the last time you checked?You picked up on the benefits of the SSD (low latency) before anyone else, it is no wonder you've figured out the benefits of ZFS too earlier than most of your compatriots as well. Well done.
elopescardozo - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Hi Matt,Thank you for the extensive report. In your testing results there are a few unexpected results. I find the difference between Nexenta and Open Solaris hard to understand, unless it is due to misalignment of the IO in the case of Nexenta.
A zvol (the basis for an iSCSI volume) is created on top of the ZFS pool with a certain block size. I believe the default is 8kB. Next you initialize the volume and format it with NTFS. By default the NTFS structure starts at sector 63 (sixty three, not a typo!), which means that every other 4kB cluster (the NTFS allocation size) falls over a zvol block boundary. That has a serious impact on performance. I saw a report of 70% improvement after properly alignment.
Is it possible that the Open Solaris and Nexenta pools were different in this respect, either because of different zvol block size (e.g. 8kB for Nexenta, 128kB for Open Solaris – larger blocks means less “boundary cases”) or differences in how the volumes were initialized and formatted?
mbreitba - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
It's possible that the sector alignment could be a problem, but I believe the build that we tested, the default sector size was set to 128kB, which was identical to OpenSolaris. If that has changed, then we should re-test with the newest build to see if that makes any differences.cdillon - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Windows Server 2008 aligns all newly created partitions at 1MB, so his NTFS block access should have been properly aligned by default.Mattbreitbach - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
I was unaware that Windows 2008 correctly aligned NTFS partitions now. Thanks for the info!