10 ms·

Solaris + ZFS = The Perfect Home File/Media Server

47 points by j2d2 17y ago

zcrar70 17y ago
This looks nice, but $1300 seems a little overkill for a home file server! (unless it's a home office?)
- kailoa 17y ago
  About half of that is the cost of the drives. That's not going to change no matter which solution you get. Compared to the 4-bay $500 Drobo, (plus $200 for DroboShare) it's not bad considering he's getting exactly what he wants. The trade off is that he has to maintain the Solaris box, and the size/footprint of the overall solution.
- jsz0 17y ago
  ^^ Yeah but realistically it's filled with 90% pirated material. At $15-$20 per movie, $10-$15 per CD, $20-$30 for HD, it's still a bargain.
javanix 17y ago
Hopefully acquiring Sun will accelerate Oracle's work on btrfs, and we Linux users can get our own copy-on-write system.
- gaius 17y ago
  More likely Oracle will abandon work on BTRFS now that they have real ZFS.
  - sneakums 17y ago
    Yeah, if I were Oracle I'd definitely throw away a native Linux filesystem in the late stages of development and start porting some goofy jock-ware from an alien kernel. But I'm not Oracle and so they're foolishly carrying on with their insane scheme: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/2880 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/2880
    - gaius 17y ago
      Oracle have said that Solaris is the main reason they bought Sun.
      - sneakums 17y ago
        Nothing I have said contradicts this.
      - nailer 17y ago
        Source?
  - nailer 17y ago
    Doubt it: """Theodore Ts'o, developer of ext3 and ext4 filesystems, said that Btrfs “has a number of the same design ideas that Reiser4 had” and that “the filesystem format has support for some advanced features that are designed to leapfrog ZFS.”""
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Sure Larry won't mind giving the world one more reason to abandon the Solaris OS he just bought. This is so Larry...
ComputerGuru 17y ago
Good setup, but way too expensive for what adds up to a highly-advanced NAS. I don't at all disagree with the OpenSolaris/ZFS assessment, but the hardware is a bit on the heavy side. You really don't need that server motherboard (knock 100 dollars off the price). The CPU is also overkill, and ECC RAM isn't necessary though at that price it's not exactly a bad idea either. The remaining cost is just HDs - you can knock one off the list if you use RAID-Z instead of RAID-Z2 and remember to replace a drive as soon as it goes bad. OpenSolaris itself doesn't need a full 320GBs for the OS and its software: an 80GB hard drive will suffice and then some.
- Freaky 17y ago
  I think ECC memory is a good idea if you can get it; turning memory errors from "random data corruption and crashes" into "harmless fmd/syslog messages" is pretty nice, and last time I looked, would add about £5 to a 4GB DDR2 system. Of course the problem then is that Intel don't support ECC on anything but Xeons; AMD are rather better, all you need is a supporting motherboard (which includes some cheap and cheerful integrated ones), any AMD CPU in the past few years will do. Now, if only Intel would get off their arses and release the W3xxx Xeons so I can build an ECC protected i7 system. 12GB without ECC is getting a bit ridiculous. I'd also go for a pair of dynamically striped mirrors instead of RAID-Z2; modern disks can already pretty much saturate GigE individually, so I'd rather go for increased overall IOPS rather than increased sequential throughput at the cost of making every drive take part in each IO.
  - glassdarkly 17y ago
    Dynamically striped mirrors? Is that RAID10?
    - Freaky 17y ago
      Yup, pretty much; if you have more than one vdev in a pool (mirror, RAIDZ, whatever), ZFS will stripe over them, varying what goes where depending on how fast it thinks they are. I've heard reports of ZFS doing things like putting more data on one vdev because the disks underlying it had 16MB of cache and those in the other vdev only had 8MB; bit fancier than what you normally associate with RAID10.
rjurney 17y ago
I love ZFS. I was on the mailing list for a year just to watch it develop. It is amazing. I love Solaris. When I deploy applications on it I get warm and fuzzies. I've used ZFS + Solaris at home and with Sun hardware in several companies for 'appliance' servers that we deployed on-site in remote locations. We were able to achieve reliable storage on a 1U server without paying for a RAID card. It was great. ZFS is great for the budget. Now I want it at home. But where's the simple appliance to do this? For a home fileserver I just want a small box large enough to hold 4 disks, and I want it to set me up a RAID-Z or mirrored ZFS when I pop them in, and serve them via all the common methods I pick via a simple web interface. Why has nobody done this? I've looked, and the only ZFS 'storage appliances' are software packages. At present I have a RAID-1 mirror on cheap external drives on a mac mini, and I KNOW the array will degrade within a couple years. Has always happened to me with software RAID. ZFS would be great, but there is no such appliance. (And yes, I tried the patch to make OS X write to ZFS... so slow it virtually locked the system). Please, someone: build this. It will be a great product. You can offer much better storage reliability than can cheap RAID with ZFS.
- notmyname 17y ago
  It sounds like what you are looking for is a Drobo (www.drobo.com). It has some shortcomings, but it is great for dead-simple backups that protect against hard drive failure.
  - rjurney 17y ago
    Thanks, that is very interesting. Not ZFS apparently, but that is the product I described.
  - joshu 17y ago
    I am excited about drobo but I've heard too many horror stories.
    - weaksauce 17y ago
      What kind of horror stories? I am looking for something like this instead of tape backups. I looked at some NAS devices that hold five drives and seem pretty robust. One of the devices can mirror itself to another NAS over the network so you can have two separate places to store your data and not have a hardware failure of one device kill the other.(one exception would be the case where the master device gets degraded to the point where bad data is being written to it and then propagates the changes to the other device. I don't know how likely this failure situation is though.)
notmyname 17y ago
I've build something similar for home/small-office use. My experiences are at http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server. Daz at http://sigtar.com/ http://sigtar.com/ has done similar things as well, and I've found his site to be invaluable as I have built my file server.
- spydez 17y ago
  Thanks for the links... You've made my day with that ACL rule. I had the new file permissions issue but hadn't had time to hunt down the solution.
jonah 17y ago
there was a similar post on nerdblog recently: http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html
Rickasaurus 17y ago
I've had a lot of success with ZFS in FreeBSD running on some very old hardware with a small ram upgrade and a stack of SATA hard disks. I did try OpenSolaris first but it didn't like my old hardware.
btw0 17y ago
I don't know if anybody is interested in Qnap TS-219, it's green and cheap http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs It uses an arm based 1.2GHz CPU with 512MB memory, it is officially supported by Debian: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/ http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/

47 points by j2d2 17y ago

zcrar70 17y ago

This looks nice, but $1300 seems a little overkill for a home file server! (unless it's a home office?)

kailoa 17y ago
About half of that is the cost of the drives. That's not going to change no matter which solution you get. Compared to the 4-bay $500 Drobo, (plus $200 for DroboShare) it's not bad considering he's getting exactly what he wants. The trade off is that he has to maintain the Solaris box, and the size/footprint of the overall solution.
jsz0 17y ago
^^ Yeah but realistically it's filled with 90% pirated material. At $15-$20 per movie, $10-$15 per CD, $20-$30 for HD, it's still a bargain.

javanix 17y ago

Hopefully acquiring Sun will accelerate Oracle's work on btrfs, and we Linux users can get our own copy-on-write system.

gaius 17y ago
More likely Oracle will abandon work on BTRFS now that they have real ZFS.
- sneakums 17y ago
  Yeah, if I were Oracle I'd definitely throw away a native Linux filesystem in the late stages of development and start porting some goofy jock-ware from an alien kernel. But I'm not Oracle and so they're foolishly carrying on with their insane scheme: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/2880 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/2880
  - gaius 17y ago
    Oracle have said that Solaris is the main reason they bought Sun.
    - sneakums 17y ago
      Nothing I have said contradicts this.
    - nailer 17y ago
      Source?
- nailer 17y ago
  Doubt it: """Theodore Ts'o, developer of ext3 and ext4 filesystems, said that Btrfs “has a number of the same design ideas that Reiser4 had” and that “the filesystem format has support for some advanced features that are designed to leapfrog ZFS.”""
rbanffy 17y ago
Sure Larry won't mind giving the world one more reason to abandon the Solaris OS he just bought. This is so Larry...

ComputerGuru 17y ago

Good setup, but way too expensive for what adds up to a highly-advanced NAS. I don't at all disagree with the OpenSolaris/ZFS assessment, but the hardware is a bit on the heavy side. You really don't need that server motherboard (knock 100 dollars off the price). The CPU is also overkill, and ECC RAM isn't necessary though at that price it's not exactly a bad idea either. The remaining cost is just HDs - you can knock one off the list if you use RAID-Z instead of RAID-Z2 and remember to replace a drive as soon as it goes bad. OpenSolaris itself doesn't need a full 320GBs for the OS and its software: an 80GB hard drive will suffice and then some.

Freaky 17y ago
I think ECC memory is a good idea if you can get it; turning memory errors from "random data corruption and crashes" into "harmless fmd/syslog messages" is pretty nice, and last time I looked, would add about £5 to a 4GB DDR2 system. Of course the problem then is that Intel don't support ECC on anything but Xeons; AMD are rather better, all you need is a supporting motherboard (which includes some cheap and cheerful integrated ones), any AMD CPU in the past few years will do. Now, if only Intel would get off their arses and release the W3xxx Xeons so I can build an ECC protected i7 system. 12GB without ECC is getting a bit ridiculous. I'd also go for a pair of dynamically striped mirrors instead of RAID-Z2; modern disks can already pretty much saturate GigE individually, so I'd rather go for increased overall IOPS rather than increased sequential throughput at the cost of making every drive take part in each IO.
- glassdarkly 17y ago
  Dynamically striped mirrors? Is that RAID10?
  - Freaky 17y ago
    Yup, pretty much; if you have more than one vdev in a pool (mirror, RAIDZ, whatever), ZFS will stripe over them, varying what goes where depending on how fast it thinks they are. I've heard reports of ZFS doing things like putting more data on one vdev because the disks underlying it had 16MB of cache and those in the other vdev only had 8MB; bit fancier than what you normally associate with RAID10.

rjurney 17y ago

I love ZFS. I was on the mailing list for a year just to watch it develop. It is amazing. I love Solaris. When I deploy applications on it I get warm and fuzzies. I've used ZFS + Solaris at home and with Sun hardware in several companies for 'appliance' servers that we deployed on-site in remote locations. We were able to achieve reliable storage on a 1U server without paying for a RAID card. It was great. ZFS is great for the budget. Now I want it at home. But where's the simple appliance to do this? For a home fileserver I just want a small box large enough to hold 4 disks, and I want it to set me up a RAID-Z or mirrored ZFS when I pop them in, and serve them via all the common methods I pick via a simple web interface. Why has nobody done this? I've looked, and the only ZFS 'storage appliances' are software packages. At present I have a RAID-1 mirror on cheap external drives on a mac mini, and I KNOW the array will degrade within a couple years. Has always happened to me with software RAID. ZFS would be great, but there is no such appliance. (And yes, I tried the patch to make OS X write to ZFS... so slow it virtually locked the system). Please, someone: build this. It will be a great product. You can offer much better storage reliability than can cheap RAID with ZFS.

notmyname 17y ago
It sounds like what you are looking for is a Drobo (www.drobo.com). It has some shortcomings, but it is great for dead-simple backups that protect against hard drive failure.
- rjurney 17y ago
  Thanks, that is very interesting. Not ZFS apparently, but that is the product I described.
- joshu 17y ago
  I am excited about drobo but I've heard too many horror stories.
  - weaksauce 17y ago
    What kind of horror stories? I am looking for something like this instead of tape backups. I looked at some NAS devices that hold five drives and seem pretty robust. One of the devices can mirror itself to another NAS over the network so you can have two separate places to store your data and not have a hardware failure of one device kill the other.(one exception would be the case where the master device gets degraded to the point where bad data is being written to it and then propagates the changes to the other device. I don't know how likely this failure situation is though.)

notmyname 17y ago

I've build something similar for home/small-office use. My experiences are at http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server. Daz at http://sigtar.com/ http://sigtar.com/ has done similar things as well, and I've found his site to be invaluable as I have built my file server.

spydez 17y ago
Thanks for the links... You've made my day with that ACL rule. I had the new file permissions issue but hadn't had time to hunt down the solution.

jonah 17y ago

there was a similar post on nerdblog recently: http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html

Rickasaurus 17y ago

I've had a lot of success with ZFS in FreeBSD running on some very old hardware with a small ram upgrade and a stack of SATA hard disks. I did try OpenSolaris first but it didn't like my old hardware.

btw0 17y ago

I don't know if anybody is interested in Qnap TS-219, it's green and cheap http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs It uses an arm based 1.2GHz CPU with 512MB memory, it is officially supported by Debian: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/ http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/