Hi, I'm planning a 18-drive (2x 9-drive arrays) storage server for this summer, and I've decided to use Solaris and ZFS to take advantage of RAID-Z.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
RAID-Z is basically a tweaked RAID-5, and can tolerate a single drive failure.
Anyway, I've been reading a bunch of docs, but a lot of them contradict each other because of the dates they were published. ZFS still seems to be under quite active development, so it's hard to find a concrete answer sometimes.
Questions:
-If a drive fails, can I drop a cold-spare in and easily rebuild the array? Does RAID-Z support hot-spares? Are you notified by some means when a device fails, or do you have to custom script / keep an eye on the diagnostics?
-I don't care that much about expansion of arrays, but I read that expansion/growing an array by adding a disk is not supported. Is this correct, or was I reading old news?
-Are there any on-the-fly disk encryption solutions that support plausible deniability that will function in the ZFS/RAID-Z setup? Looking for something similar to TrueCrypt for Linux.
-Does anyone have any experience administering ZFS storage that can add anything? I set up a theoretical system in VMWare, and it seemed easy enough, but I had no way to get a feel for performance because all of my virtual drives were on the same physical device.
Thanks, any input appreciated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
RAID-Z is basically a tweaked RAID-5, and can tolerate a single drive failure.
Anyway, I've been reading a bunch of docs, but a lot of them contradict each other because of the dates they were published. ZFS still seems to be under quite active development, so it's hard to find a concrete answer sometimes.
Questions:
-If a drive fails, can I drop a cold-spare in and easily rebuild the array? Does RAID-Z support hot-spares? Are you notified by some means when a device fails, or do you have to custom script / keep an eye on the diagnostics?
-I don't care that much about expansion of arrays, but I read that expansion/growing an array by adding a disk is not supported. Is this correct, or was I reading old news?
-Are there any on-the-fly disk encryption solutions that support plausible deniability that will function in the ZFS/RAID-Z setup? Looking for something similar to TrueCrypt for Linux.
-Does anyone have any experience administering ZFS storage that can add anything? I set up a theoretical system in VMWare, and it seemed easy enough, but I had no way to get a feel for performance because all of my virtual drives were on the same physical device.
Thanks, any input appreciated.