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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mbreitba - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Thanks for the comment on the ZIL.As far as using the X25-E's as ZIL devices - when we built the box initially, the X25-E's were the best choice at the time. Future builds will probably include a capacitor-backed SSD.
James5mith - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
For what it's worth, we are currently using roughly 16 of the Supermicro 846-E1 chassis in our storage solutions.Drive numbering is from bottom to top, left to right. Don't know if this helps or not.
5 11 17 23
4 10 16 22
3 9 15 21
2 8 14 20
1 7 13 19
0 6 12 18
badhack - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
I would be curious to know how the performance compares to traditional fs caching on Linux w/ ext3 or ext4 with same amount of memory and a few SSD drives.Maveric007 - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
There are a few options within Linux that would be pretty interesting to see. FS caching and the different schedulers that are available within Linux. Also I would throw out ext3 and replace that with ext4 and xfs. Redhat is now supporting xfs and there are just tons of tunables for xfs compared to the other file systems.badnews - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Thanks Matt, I've been following the build over at your blog and this is an excellent article to tie it all together. I hope you follow up with your "things we'd do differently" in future articles. I would also love to see some more benchmarking against more alternatives, e.g. Open-E, or even an off-the-shelf EqualLogic.Keep up the good work :)
Fallen Kell - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Well, I know at least for Solaris 10.... I would suspect that OpenSolaris has it as well by now, since it has been out for at least 4 years that I know of...https://<host>:6789
mbreitba - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
You can install the ZFS Web GUI from the Solaris toolkit, but it isn't bundled into OpenSolaris. It is binary compatible, but it doesn't give any good options for iSCSI setup, as it only supported the old iSCSI target rather than the new COMSTAR target.sfc - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
How can you spend a page talking about how you aren't really worried about the future of Opensolaris, and then have half a paragraph mentioning "oh, btw, it's cancelled"? The project is clearly dead. They stopped releasing source almost a month ago. Oracle has made absolutely no guarantees about when or how source would be released in the future. For all we know, they could release only portions of Solaris Express, and do it months to years after the binaries drop.http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=...
I love ZFS/Opensolaris, I use it at home, but Opensolaris is dead.
Mattbreitbach - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
OpenSolaris is indeed dead as far as development goes, but it's still viable if you want to use the last build released which is what all of our performance figures are based on. I will be writing some companion articles to this one talking about not only the death of OpenSolaris, but it's alternative, OpenIndiana, and the Promise M610i used as a comparison in this article.andersenep - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
The OpenSolaris project may be dead but ZFS and all the CDDL licensed code is still out there. Illumos, OpenIndiana and a few other distros are still out there and available. Oracle has stated they will continue to release source code after Solaris releases and will also provide binary preview releases in the form of Solaris Express. To say Solaris and ZFS are dead is pretty premature.Whatever happens, the existing code is out there. To call it dead is a bit premature. Sure the project that had the name 'OpenSolaris' has been canceled, but everything that made it up (minus a small few closed bits that have already been replaced) lives on.