ZFS for business

[manfredell]

Business users, with the 10-12 bay monsters, would really appreciate ZFS filesystem instead of ext4....

Wonder who the first NAS vendor will be with this.

[pz1]

Business users, with the 10-12 bay monsters, would really appreciate ZFS filesystem instead of ext4....

Wonder who the first NAS vendor will be with this.

http://www.freenas.org/

[manfredell]

Business users, with the 10-12 bay monsters, would really appreciate ZFS filesystem instead of ext4....

Wonder who the first NAS vendor will be with this.

http://www.freenas.org/

Nice project for home users. But this is not what I meant.

[jrosado]

ZFS is very intensive in terms of memory consume. Also it starts to slow, when the free space decreases. ZFS in theory is very good. In practice, forget it. And i know what i'm talking about

[dejvnull]

If this is what you are looking for then you have to go higher up in the enterprise storage chain and then things start getting a lot expensive.

The solution from Nexenta http://www.nexenta.com/corp/, NexentaStor is based on OpenSolaris and will be based on Illumos, a fully opensource version of OpenSolaris.
Nexenta also has a community edition http://nexentastor.org/?utm_source=nexenta&utm_medium=referral which seems quite decent.

OpenSolaris and Illumos fully implement ZFS.
NexentaStor is a software based NAS system implemented on hardware or virtual.

It seems pretty decent as a storage system, can be fully supported with enterprise class support, and I myself would like to give it ago vs a NetApp NAS unit when I take one out of production.

Also if your really good with FreeBSD/Linux then you could run FreeBSD with ZFS (which freenas is based on). I have 2 massive 48TB SuperMicro units running this and the biggest caveat is the lack of good management GUIs and reporting tools which you have to create a lot of yourself.

Also in the not to distant future a new filesystem is coming out that is fully GPL and will run on Linux etc, it is acronymed Btrfs https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

I myself would really like if any of the lower end storage suppliers Synology, Thecus or QNAP would implement a enterprise filesystem like Btrfs when it's fully available.

My 2 cents.

/Dave

[cfuttrup]

Business users, with the 10-12 bay monsters, would really appreciate ZFS filesystem instead of ext4....

I think you're completely wrong here.

Can you explain to us why you believe that ZFS is better for you?

[zhivotnoe]

I think you're completely wrong here.
Can you explain to us why you believe that ZFS is better for you?

I can! I can!
For example - snapshots.
This is more than enough.
Next one is deduplication.
Then is simplicity and flexibility administer it.

[manfredell]

Competition already has ZFS!!!!

http://info.netgear.com/forms/2012-Netg ... A-Solution

[Solandri]

ZFS is very intensive in terms of memory consume. Also it starts to slow, when the free space decreases. ZFS in theory is very good. In practice, forget it. And i know what i'm talking about

I actually returned the Synology I bought, and put together my own NAS running FreeNAS so I could run ZFS. (There were other reasons but ZFS was one of the main ones.) I've been running it for over a year now so I think I can say a few things about it.

Memory and speed are only a problem if you have deduplication turned on. Dedupe turns out to be a real pig, dropping local write speeds on my 3-disk ZFS volume from over 150 MB/s to 35 MB/s on a quad-core i5 with 8 GB of RAM (Samba/Windows sharing write speeds were 8-25 MB/s). After that experience, I'd say use dedupe only if you're running a huge virtual server farm where it will save you gobs of disk space. Or set up just one volume where it's turned on, and try to put all files which might be duplicated in that one volume. For all other cases, turn it off.

With dedupe off, I haven't noticed any speed problems. The ZFS filesystem benchmarked the same as the RAID 5 filesystem I set up first as a test. Yes ZFS will use the entire 16 GB of RAM if I let it (I upgraded it for virtual machines), but if I limit it to 4 GB it's perfectly happy. 4GB costs less than $20 retail, about $12 wholesale. There's no excuse for not including at least 4 GB on any new system, even if it's a NAS.

I think you're completely wrong here.
Can you explain to us why you believe that ZFS is better for you?

I can! I can!
For example - snapshots.
This is more than enough.
Next one is deduplication.
Then is simplicity and flexibility administer it.

There's also compression, with your choice of compression algorithm.

Copy on write. If you're saving over an existing file and the write fails because, say, the app crashes, you don't lose the original file. That's because it doesn't overwrite like other filesystems do; it writes a new file first, then when it's finished it changes the file pointer from the old file to the new one.

The zpool management is pretty neat in that it doesn't distinguish between local disks, remote disks, and files. You can create a "3 disk array" using one local disk, a remote SAS disk, and a file on another disk if you wish. I haven't really found a use for it aside from testing, but I have to figure that sort of flexibility is useful somewhere.

Can set up space on an SSD as read/write caches. Not always recommended (it can wear our your SSD quickly) but can be useful depending on your application.

But the big one for me was protection against silent bit rot. That's where a bit in a file changes on disk due to some stray cosmic ray, and you never notice it because the filesystem just believes that's the way the file has always been. ZFS does this checking and correction automatically every time you read a file. In theory RAID 5 could do it too, but AFAIK no RAID 5 implementation does it. The only tools I've seen to do it are clumsy add-ons of questionable reliability.

I have over 10 years of my photos (digital and scans) archived on my file server, and I did notice bit rot in a few of them (the photo loads partway, then is corrupted). I don't want to have to detect these manually - if I don't notice it, my backups will be overwritten by the corrupted version. And I don't want to fix these manually. We invented computers so we wouldn't have to do these things manually. It's about time this sort of file integrity and correcting was added to the filesystem so the computer does the work, not me.

All that said, the one thing I have to put far in Synology's favor is they've done a marvelous job optimizing Windows filesharing over Samba. I've tweaked and tweaked my Samba config, and the best I can manage is about 80 MB/s writes, 60 MB/s reads (from a default of about 60/35 MB/s with a vanilla Linux install; FreeNAS' defaults are a bit better). That's using an SSD so I know it's not a hardware problem. Non-Samba read/writes can hit the theoretical max of 115 MB/s, but Samba remains a bottleneck. Synology has done a great job tuning Samba's performance on their high-end NASes. If you absolutely must have near max-Gigabit speeds with Windows shares, then I haven't found a way to do that yet with ZFS (not ZFS' fault, it's Samba's fault). If Synology added ZFS support, I would switch back in a heartbeat (reliability becomes a problem when running virtual machines on your file server).

[jrosado]

Good luck with your freenas system

I've been there and it was a complete nightmare...Starting with the high needs form memory (and i had 8GB of RAM), an high and consuming power processor, speeds that start to slow has we fill the array, and the worst: incompatibility issues with almost nay controller which lead to high LCC and killed 2 of my hard discs... To not talk about the impossibility of expand the array

I got back to synology (which i should never had leaved) and no problems at all (except for the wasted money on the freenas systems, trying to get some decent performance and compatible system...)

[Jurgen]

ZFS is very intensive in terms of memory consume. Also it starts to slow, when the free space decreases. ZFS in theory is very good. In practice, forget it. And i know what i'm talking about

Well I do known hat I am talking about too as xxxBSD user for more as a decade !

No doubt ZFS is far more superior as ext4. Currently it IS the best filesystem arround.

ref: ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include data integrity (protection against bit rot, etc.), support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs.

On a NAS speed is your last concern if You do use copper. As a tuned ZFS can perform faster as ext4 with ZIL. You can create 1, 2 or 3 disks for parity and You can make hotsnaps (backup of filesystem IN operation) of Your filesystem. Additionally You can instruct the filesystem to write each bit multiple times to have maximum security.

ZFS is a very good option to combine with hypervisors such as ESXi. It is currently the best option to consider when You have 4 or more disks.

I agree, You need to put some more memory, so what ? Price is cheap those days.

FreeNAS can be used on an enterprise level. A nice project which deserves a close watch is
zfsguru.

ZFS is available for linux, so it could be possible to implement it, if there is the will to do it.

A pity, synology is not build on top of xxxBSD, but on a linux version....

[Jurgen]

Good luck with your freenas system

I've been there and it was a complete nightmare...Starting with the high needs form memory (and i had 8GB of RAM), an high and consuming power processor, speeds that start to slow has we fill the array, and the worst: incompatibility issues with almost nay controller which lead to high LCC and killed 2 of my hard discs... To not talk about the impossibility of expand the array

I got back to synology (which i should never had leaved) and no problems at all (except for the wasted money on the freenas systems, trying to get some decent performance and compatible system...)

The reliability of ZFS is much higher as ext4, as it use it's own raid functions. The first priority for a NAS is the safety of your data, not performance.

A RAID10 can compete in performance, but in terms of realibity RAIDZ3 blows it away....
I do agree, You need, well, a nice pool of disks.

I do run currently an array of 11 disks in RAIDZ3, with ZIL and L2ARC. And I would see this on a synology. It would be a great transition.

In terms of memory, well try zfsguru, not freeNAS. The overhead is minimal.

[jrosado]

The reliability of ZFS is much higher as ext4, as it use it's own raid functions. The first priority for a NAS is the safety of your data, not performance.

A RAID10 can compete in performance, but in terms of realibity RAIDZ3 blows it away....
I do agree, You need, well, a nice pool of disks.

I do run currently an array of 11 disks in RAIDZ3, with ZIL and L2ARC. And I would see this on a synology. It would be a great transition.

In terms of memory, well try zfsguru, not freeNAS. The overhead is minimal.

It's funny you talk about reliability, because it was when i had freenas with your so loved ZFS that i had more problems with corrupt files and lost files in just 4 months that i ever had with ext4 and synology systems in 5 years