ZFS. Respect.

Today someone asked me: "You speak about ZFS a lot. I know other people that talk about the latest filesystems with praise, but generally speaking they just don't have much to offer. Is ZFS that different?" My answer is "yes." But, of course, I can't leave it at that. I'm not going to make a performance argument -- ZFS is fast in some cases and slow in others -- just like everything else.

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So, we're moving from an old Cyrus installation to Zimbra. We considered moving to Dovecot, but the need for tight corporate calendaring that isn't hosted by big brother (Google or Y!) was too strong. So, I call up Zimbra... Me: Gimme that for Solaris. Zimbra: No. Me: Umm... It's open source and the "closed" bits are non-native Java. Zimbra: Umm... It doesn't work on Solaris, just install Linux. Me: Just give me a sound off-site backup strategy that works as well as ZFS.

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So, the state of open source database replication is pretty sad. MySQL replication just doesn't cut it in many serious environments because the slaves can't keep up with the write load on the master. So, PostgreSQL right? Well, not so fast. PostgreSQL replication is handled in one of two ways: Slony or PITR (point-in-time recovery). Slony provides all the same features as MySQL's replication (except that it is much harder to setup and maintain), but also boasts the same acute performance issues -- a busy master can easily outpace slaves, leaving them in the dust.

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I am very pleased to learn that shortly (a year or so) after Sun's opening of Solaris under the CDDL open source license that communities outside of the Sun/Solaris community are truly seeing benefit. Pawel Dawidek announced yesterday that ZFS is now in FreeBSD HEAD and will be available in 7.0. This is very exciting news. We use ZFS and many of its advanced features extensively here at the $DAYJOB and I can say with authority that ZFS is damn cool juju.

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One of the things that ZFS boast most is its scalability -- Z is for zetabyte after all. Trivia question: what is the first thing you do after you put data on your production ZFS volume? That's right, you back it up to your backup infrastructure. A lot of systems use tar or other archive like derivatives to manage backups. This technique is particularly awful with databases. Databases usually consist of very very large files (multi-gigabyte) that have minimal changes to them.

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We’ve had great luck with ZFS on some “largish” systems. I haven’t worked out how to blog about them yet as they contain a lot of client specifics, but I now have ZFS in a happy place of my mind. However, most of the stuff we do doesn’ts go over NFS. So, Eric (who leads out operations group) was tasked to solve some heterogenous home dir issues across a large build cluster we have at the $DAYJOB.

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Author's picture

Theo Schlossnagle

Distributed Systems, Scalability, and Operations. read more

CEO - Circonus

Maryland, USA