Linked by John Finigan on Mon 21st Apr 2008 19:00 UTC
When it comes to dealing with storage, Solaris 10 provides admins with more choices than any other operating system. Right out of the box, it offers two filesystems, two volume managers, an iscsi target and initiator, and, naturally, an NFS server. Add a couple of Sun packages and you have volume replication, a cluster filesystem, and a hierarchical storage manager. Trust your data to the still-in-development features found in OpenSolaris, and you can have a fibre channel target and an in-kernel CIFS server, among other things. True, some of these features can be found in any enterprise-ready UNIX OS. But Solaris 10 integrates all of them into one well-tested package. Editor's note: This is the first of our published submissions for the 2008 Article Contest.
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RE[2]: ZFS is a dead end.
by Doc Pain on Mon 21st Apr 2008 21:35
in reply to "RE: ZFS is a dead end."
Member since:2006-10-08
I have some concerns about mixing the fs and raid layers.
Furthermore, I can imagine where plain UFS is the best solution (i. e. where ZFS would be "too much of the good"), for example on systems with lower ressources or where extending the the storage "pool" won't happen. UFS is a very stable and fast file system (the article mentions this), and along with the well known UNIX mounting operations, it can still be very powerful. For example, FreeBSD uses the UFS2 file system with "soft updates". But well, these settings usually aren't places where Solaris come to use.
But the self healing features are attractive.
But remember, kids: This doesn't obsolete your accurate backups. :-)
And the admin utilities are a dream.
Once you have taken the fime to read the zfs manpages, these utilities are very welcome. Especially the central zfs service program interface makes formatting and mounting very easy. It has advantages over the relatively static /etc/vfstab.
And nice to see that the Veritas volume manager has been mentioned in the article. IN VINUM VERITAS. See vinum(8) manpage. =^_^=
Edited 2008-04-21 21:38 UTC
RE[3]: ZFS is a dead end.
by jwwf on Mon 21st Apr 2008 22:38
in reply to "RE[2]: ZFS is a dead end."
Member since:2006-01-19
But remember, kids: This doesn't obsolete your accurate backups. :-)
Wiser words are rarely spoken
And nice to see that the Veritas volume manager has been mentioned in the article. IN VINUM VERITAS. See vinum(8) manpage. =^_^=
Wow, never heard that before, that's a great pun. Anyway, I am a fan of VxVM / FS. I heard somewhere that it may be open sourced; I hope this is true even if it sounds somewhat unlikely. VxFS on *BSD would be good stuff.
Member since:
2005-07-24
Could you elaborate on that? I have some concerns about mixing the fs and raid layers. But the self healing features are attractive. And the admin utilities are a dream. I only wish that I had such a nice command-line interface to manipulate fdisk/mdadm/lvm/mkfs in the Linux world. There is no reason that this could not be done. But the fact is that, in all these years, it hasn't been done. People point me at EVMS when I speak along these lines. But EVMS really doesn't cut it. In fact, every time I check it out, I come away wondering what it is really for, and what problem it actually solves.