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Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?

Posted by kdawson on from the fast-secure-reliable-cheap dept.

hoggoth writes "As a common everyman who needs big, fast, reliable storage without a big budget, I have been following a number of emerging technologies and I think they have finally become usable in combination. Specifically, it appears to me that I can put together the little brother of a $50,000 NAS/SAN solution for under $3,000. Storage experts: please tell me why this is or isn't feasible." Read on for the details of this cheap storage solution.

Get a CoolerMaster Stacker enclosure like this one (just the hardware not the software) that can hold up to 12 SATA drives. Install OpenSolaris and create ZFS pools with RAID-Z for redundancy. Export some pools with Samba for use as a NAS. Export some pools with iSCSI for use as a SAN. Run it over Gigabit Ethernet. Fast, secure, reliable, easy to administer, and cheap. Usable from Windows, Mac, and Linux. As a bonus ZFS let's me create daily or hourly snapshots at almost no cost in disk space or time.

Total cost: 1.4 Terabytes: $2,000. 7.7 Terabytes: $4,200 (Just the cost of the enclosure and the drives). That's an order of magnitude less expensive than other solutions.

Add redundant power supplies, NIC cards, SATA cards, etc as your needs require.

9 of 578 comments (clear)

  1. Specifics please. by PowerEdge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not enough specifics here. I am going to say do your thing. If it works, you're a hero and saved 47k. If it doesn't obfuscate and negotiate the 50k of storage down to 47k. Win for all.

    Unless you would like to give more specifics. Cause I am going to say in 99% of cases where you want fast, reliable, and cheap storage you only get to pick two.

    1. Re:Specifics please. by tgatliff · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "comsumer-grade hardware"???

      Do you honestly believe the slogan of "business-grade"? Come on, let the marketing jargon go. Hardware designs are expensive, so rarely are there multiple designs. Sales guys are selling you additional support, but the hardware is rarely different. If it is, then the volume is not there, so the reliability is actually worse. Volume is the king of reliability. Reliability is always more dependent on the age of the design and its volume rather than the intended customer...

    2. Re:Specifics please. by Ngarrang · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unless you would like to give more specifics. Cause I am going to say in 99% of cases where you want fast, reliable, and cheap storage you only get to pick two.

      I disagree completely. Computer hardware is a commodity. The big box makers are afraid of this very kind of configuration which would blow them out of business if more people caught on to it. No, they use FUD to convince PHBs that because of the low cost, it cannot possibly be as good. Hot-swap and hot-spare are commodity technologies. But, please, feel free to continue the FUD, because it helps the bottom line.

      --
      Bearded Dragon
    3. Re:Specifics please. by Score+Whore · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No kidding. Without specific details there is no way to answer whether this is a good solution to his particular situation. However, even in the absence of details I can say this:

      1) That case has twelve spindles. You aren't going to get the same performance from a dozen drives as you get from an hundred.

      2) That system includes a small Celeron D processor with 512 MB RAM. You aren't going to get the same performance as you'll get from multiple dedicated RAID controllers with twenty+ gig of dedicated disk cache.

      3) Your single gigabit ethernet interface won't even come close to the performance of the three or four (or ten) 2 gigabit fibre channel adapters involved in most SAN arrays.

      4) Software iscsi initiators and targets aren't a replacement for dedicated adapters.

      5) The Hitachi array at work never goes down. Ever. Not for expansions. Not for drive replacements. Not for relayouts. The reliability of a PC and the opportunity to do online maintenance won't approach that of a real array.

      Don't get me wrong. That case makes me all tingly inside -- for personal use. But as a SAN replacement, fuck no. It's not the same thing. The original question just shows ignorance of what SANs are and the roles they fill in the data center.

      As a workgroup storage solution for a handful of end users on their desktops, that solution probably may be a good fit. As a storage solution for ten (or two hundred) business critical server systems, no way.

  2. Re:ok for low end, not for high by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Precisely. The question in the title is a little bit like asking "Will large PC clusters obsolete mainframes?" or "Will Web applications obsolete traditional GUI applications?" The answer is, as always, "It depends on what you use it for." For high-performance databases or a high-traffic Exchange server, these things may not work well.

    I've seen plenty iSCSI of solutions coupled with NAS servers that get pretty good throughput in this price range that are already integrated and ready to go, but the bottom line is that if you want high-peformance, high-availability storage for I/O-intensive applications, you need a fiber SAN/NAS solution.

    --
    My blog
  3. Re:ok for low end, not for high by Jim+Hall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I agree. At my work, we have a SAN ... low-end frames (SATA) to mid-range (FC+SATA) to high-end frames (FC.) We put a front-end on the low-end and mid-range storage using a NAS, so you can still access using the storage fabric or over IP delivery. Having a SAN was a good idea for us, as it allowed us to centralize our storage provisioning.

    I'm familiar with ZFS and the many cool features laid out in this Ask Slashdot. The simple answer is: ZFS isn't a good fit to replace expensive SAN/NASs. However, ZFS on a good server with good storage might be a way to replace an inexpensive SAN/NAS. Depending on your definition of "inexpensive." And if you don't mind the server being your single point of failure.

  4. Re:ZFS by chegosaurus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > Why not IBM's JFS? Or ReiserFS?

    Because they are just filesystems. ZFS is also a volume manager.

    > Or a CentOS based OS in place of Solaris?

    Because CentOS doesn't have ZFS.

    +4 Interesting. Awesome.

  5. Quality - industrial vs. commercial by FuzzyDaddy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The "consumer-grade" and "business-grade" are the same off the shelf stuff, but if you are getting business-grade stuff from a reputable vendor they QA the consumer-grade parts, throw out the bad ones, and stamp "business-grade" on the ones that survive.

    I worked at ATMEL many years ago in their EPROM division. I had an up close and personal view of the screening flows, both Military and otherwise. Let's put aside the issue of Military screening, which is extensive and costly. You can't make very much out of Military grade ICs, because there are not very many available.

    The difference between commercial and industrial parts is one of operating temperature, not quality. (In point of fact, there was no actual difference in the screening or handling.) The quality standards for both parts were the same - the goal was always zero defects. I spent weeks weeding out a problem with a 50 ppm failure rate that was slipping through our screening, and everyone was damned happy when I fixed it.

    There's no reason to expect a correlation between maximum operating temperature and quality. A part might run too slow at elevated temperature to pass, but this will usually happen for process variation reasons that do not affect the expect lifetime of the part.

    Any part coming from a reputable IC manufacturer should have the same level of quality, regardless of the rating.

    Now, that being said, there is a very serious quality issue that an OEM does need to address, and that's counterfeit parts. If an OEM is not careful about where their parts come from, or buys them cheap and looks the other way, then there quality will obviously suffer. But this isn't so much a commercial versus industrial quality; it's about honest versus dishonest business practices.

    --
    It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
  6. Re:ZFS by ChrisA90278 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ZFS will do some things the others file systems can't. First off it is "copy on write" and keeps a complete backwards version history so if a file is damaged, deleted or you just need to back out a change to a word processing document you can do that. Also ZFS moves both volume managment and raid into the file system. You can add and remove physical drives without stopping the system. And of course it is huge. A 128 bit file system can't ever be filled. (yes "never" do the math) It's also fast and maintains end to end checksum. Sun really has raised the bar here. That said this is not what a typical home user with only a hand full of disk drives and users needs.

    Back to the question. Can it replace a SAN. Depends on the required performance. If you have 25 or 30 video edit workstations or a corporation with 5,000 desk tops it's hard to see how one Solaris server is going to work. You need something that can a lot of IO bandwidth.