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Thread: ZFS backup storage server
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12-10-2012, 11:22 AM #1Web Hosting Master
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ZFS backup storage server
We are looking for good value central backup server for all of our cpanel servers, I googled and found that RAID-Z2 (similar to RAID-6) seems a good option and we want to setup it on software based without any raid card
my question are :
* to how many HDs that we will hit performance bottleneck? so we could evaluate cost/performance
* and any budget and smart method to boost performance up?
thanks!
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12-10-2012, 11:34 AM #2Temporarily Suspended
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Hi
Have you looked at this ?
http://nexentastor.org/ <- will do 16TB for free
so 4 x 4tb
or
8 x 2tb
16 x 1tb
From experience the more spindles the better the performance, but the higher the running costs (ie more disks)
Thanks
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12-10-2012, 11:40 AM #3Web Hosting Guru
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8 x 2TB should be sufficient for a medium size deployment, enable compression to save storage and add a ZIL SSD for better write performance.
LoopByte
India Based Dedicated Servers, VPS & Hosting Services
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12-10-2012, 11:50 AM #4Aspiring Evangelist
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+1 for nexenta.
OCOSA Communications | Since 2003
http://www.ocosa.com
Domains, Hosting, Business Solutions, and Connectivity
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12-10-2012, 11:58 AM #5Backup Guru
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Make sure that you test it well before using ZFS. We used ZFS (with RAID-Z2) on some backup servers a few years ago, and had a terrible experience, on both Solaris and FreeBSD.
Assuming that you have lots of RAM, and that they have fixed the stability issues, you should get decent performance in the beginning. The problem is that it gets extremely fragmented over time. Within months, the servers were becoming barely usable, which made it all the more difficult to get rid of ZFS.
As far as I know, there's still no online defragmentation feature, which is what is needed to make ZFS usable as a central backup server. It might work well enough for you, but keep a close eye on it.Scott Burns, President
BQ Internet Corporation
Remote Rsync and FTP backup solutions
*** http://www.bqbackup.com/ ***
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12-10-2012, 12:08 PM #6Web Hosting Master
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There are no stability issues. We have about 10 servers running Opensolaris / Nexenta Core with an uptime > 1 year (one > 2 years). Zero crashes or issues on all of them. Different clients using them and all kinds of disks (mostly nearline SAS though). All Supermicro servers.
YISP - High Bandwidth dedicated servers and colocation in YISP-AS(Amsterdam)!
Website: http://www.yisp.nl
Contact: info "(AT)" yisp.nl
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12-10-2012, 12:18 PM #7Web Hosting Guru
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We also have few Nexenta/OpenIndiana boxes running pretty well.
LoopByte
India Based Dedicated Servers, VPS & Hosting Services
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12-10-2012, 03:00 PM #8Junior Guru
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word of warning, nexenta license says you cannot use it in commercial or business use.
have no heard anyone getting sued or contacted about it, but you never know.
http://www.nexentastor.org/projects/...mmunityEdition
Production use is not allowed with Community edition. It is designed and intended to help people become familiar with the product or for hobbiest use.
2.2 If You have acquired a Community Edition license, the total amount of RAW Storage Space is limited as specified on the Site and is subject to change without notice. The Community Edition may ONLY be used for educational, academic and other non-commercial purposes expressly excluding any commercial usage. The Trial Edition licenses may ONLY be used for the sole purposes of evaluating the suitability of the Product for licensing of the Enterprise Edition for a fee. If You have obtained the Product under discounted educational pricing, You are only permitted to use the Product for educational and academic purposes only and expressly excluding any commercial purposes.
http://www.napp-it.org
on any supported solarwinds based distribution
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12-10-2012, 03:08 PM #9Web Hosting Evangelist
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ZFS likes ram and likes it even more as you use more and more features.
As to performance a single 7200 rpm sata drive can take more than a single ge can feed it. Even running a pair of 20gbs infiniband connections full out were not pushing our 48 drive backup heads (144TB in 4ru 192TB if we bought more expensive per GB drives). That said look hard at what your using to back up all backup apps are not created equal some can really stress out the servers and/or the backup heads. We do treat backup drives like tape so no raid the backup system makes redundant copies on multiple backup heads and no random io trashing performance.
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12-10-2012, 10:00 PM #10Web Hosting Guru
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+1 for napp-it.org. The main force behind that is active on our fourms.
The big thing with ZFS software RAID is that you use compatible hardware and test beforehand. Great solution though. Performance wise for backup no issue. You could also use RAID-Z3 for a larger set of disks if you wanted.My site dedicated to server and workstation hardware: http://www.servethehome.com
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12-11-2012, 03:16 AM #11Web Hosting Master
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all the zfs issues i have seen has been a lack of zfs knowledge not zfs
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12-11-2012, 07:59 AM #12Web Hosting Master
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http://www.nexentastor.org/ does looks good! thanks!
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12-11-2012, 09:59 AM #13Temporarily Suspended
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12-11-2012, 11:02 AM #14Web Hosting Master
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just want to share this nice article
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki...ractices_Guide
then I have a question after reading, article says
**For better performance, a mirrored configuration is strongly favored over a RAIDZ configuration particularly for large, uncacheable, random read loads.**
is it a better than raidZ for backup purpose?
also, if I go with 2TBx6 with raidz2 for beginning, is it easy to add more disks to raidz2 in the future when needed?
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12-11-2012, 11:33 AM #15Web Hosting Master
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and what about
http://www.freenas.org/
http://www.nas4free.org/
should be no 16TB limitations?
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12-11-2012, 08:30 PM #16Junior Guru Wannabe
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No because it's a waste of disks, go with RAID-Z2 or Z3 for backup.
First you have to understand how ZFS works. ZFS works with pools and each pool has at least one vdev. Each vdev has a set of disks in it and provides the IOP performance of one disk. So the more vdev's the more performance.
So can you expand a 6 disk RAID-Z2? Yes. Cheaply? No.
You cannot expand a vdev but you can add more vdev's to a pool, which will increase IOPs and storage. You can mix and match different vdev sizes but it's not recommended, so another vdev of 6 disks would be required to expand it.
I just use straight FreeBSD, you could install ZFSGuru if you needed a webUI.
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01-21-2013, 11:39 AM #17Web Hosting Master
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can I ask you guys that which system of ZFS I could use to "sell" XFS backup space easily with add/delete/upgrade user function and could set disk/bandwidth limitations on WEB GUI?
did look at all system mentioned above, none of them could do these
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01-21-2013, 11:53 AM #18WHT Addict
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Spend a little extra time and go with Solaris 11, the license is around $1k /year including support. They run the most current version of ZFS with all the features you would hope for. We run a raid 10 like setup on our system, iSCSI and NFS. Running a Zpool is a walk in the park once you've played with it. The documentation is good, and will walk you over all the setup and configuration, and it's rock solid.
Code:zpool status pool: fast state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM fast ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t50014EE0AE14A803d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t50014EE6AD813A2Dd0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t50014EE6AD8132EFd0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t50014EE6AD8132FAd0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-2 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t50014EE0036AD948d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t50014EE058C01ADDd0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-3 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t50014EE602D5CF31d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t50014EE602D69542d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 logs mirror-4 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t5001517BB2A9B8E7d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t5001517BB2A9BA97d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 cache c0t500253855003DC8Cd0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t500253855003DC90d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: resilvered 10.1G in 0h1m with 0 errors on Mon Jan 7 16:13:04 2013 config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c8d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c9d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors pool: slow state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM slow ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t5000C5004E4C7469d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t5000C5004E46E899d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t5000C5004E46EF32d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t5000C5004E482DA6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT fast 2.17T 52.7G 2.12T 2% 1.00x ONLINE - rpool 55.5G 10.7G 44.8G 19% 1.00x ONLINE - slow 5.44T 1.71T 3.73T 31% 1.00x ONLINE -
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01-21-2013, 12:51 PM #19Junior Guru
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We use Sun X4540 machines (48 drives in 4U) for backup servers
would recommend either going napp-it or solaris 11.
First because Nexenta is not free for comercial use, second because we found issues on multiple platforms with detection and ejection of dead drives ( dead drive manifested with a normal looking zpool but ALL iscsi target just went dead on the machine till we removed the physical drive from the machine).
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01-21-2013, 12:56 PM #20Web Hosting Guru
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Solaris 11 does make a lot of sense, especially given the newer features available.
If you wanted to play, here is an OpenIndiana + napp-it installation. We are going to add a bunch more of these ZFS guides.My site dedicated to server and workstation hardware: http://www.servethehome.com
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01-21-2013, 01:55 PM #21Russ
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Check out OmniOS, we recently migrated our storage servers to it from Nexenta. It's a light weight, runs very well and they offer commercial support.
Each of our OmniOS servers has 20TB of space, 1TB of SSD capacity (L2-cache), 196GB memory (L1-cache) and we use a ZeusRAM SSD for the ZIL. These servers are getting hammered all day in production and we've never had any issues with OmniOS or performance.
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01-21-2013, 02:43 PM #22Web Hosting Guru
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My site dedicated to server and workstation hardware: http://www.servethehome.com
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01-21-2013, 04:15 PM #23Russ
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01-21-2013, 07:33 PM #24Web Hosting Guru
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Working on that! Thanks for the feedback.
The other project right now that is taking a TON of time is the colo build-out. Now that the hardware side is done, picking what software to run for the cluster is something I'm less equipped for.
I will say, I am fairly impressed with the price/ performance of the Dell C6100's. Will be doing more on that.
Once those are out of the way, we can get some more on the OmniOS + napp-it installation. We did find one nuance to the OmniOS and napp-it installation but are working through it.My site dedicated to server and workstation hardware: http://www.servethehome.com
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