Comments on: Oh Thumpers, Oh Thumpers

By: Lenny Tropiano

Lenny Tropiano — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:56:10 +0000

We’ve heard for large strip/sequential reads/writes thumper performs as you specified above. But for random access, it’s performance is pretty poor. Do you have any numbers on that?

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 22:51:36 +0000

Bob, try iSCSI. In fact, I think there was a previous Joyeur post about iSCSI+ZFS.

By: Bob Aman

Bob Aman — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:09:33 +0000

Hmm, well, it’s awesome that you guys have a Thumper… however, I’d be curious about how you’d set this sort of thing up if you had a bunch of smaller boxes that you wanted to use with ZFS.

I’m mainly curious because I’m expecting to be in a situation soon where I’m going to need some serious storage space, but it’s for data that will start out small (by small I mean 500GB-1TB) and grow from there. The data in question should be highly compressible, so ZFS-like compression would be awesome. But I’d rather just buy the boxes one at a time as I need them, though it’d be a real pain in the neck to have to deal with the storage as separate volumes. Basically, I’m looking for a poor-man’s SAN. I get the impression that ZFS can’t do this, but perhaps something else on top of ZFS?

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:38:29 +0000

Hm, are users allowed to take snapshots of stuff on their container?

Though I probably wouldn’t use it. My backups are going to strongspace.

Would be neat to come up with some rsync wrapper script that was installed on each container that allowed users to do snapshot backups to strongspace.

By: Jason Hoffman

Jason Hoffman — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:37:32 +0000

The manual is pretty good.

By: cch

cch — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:30:44 +0000

There’s one funny thing about all zfs posts I read on the net:

They never explain what the issued commands mean.

Sure most of the time the basics can be inferred, but occasionally one wonders about the intricacies. It wouldn’t hurt to briefly state what you’re doing.