Solaris + ZFS = The Perfect Home File/Media Server

http://bitdrop.st0w.com/2009/05/16/solaris-zfs-the-perfect-home-file-and-media-server/

by j2d2 • 17 years ago

47 38 17 years ago

bitdrop.st0w.com

zcrar70• 17 years ago

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

kailoa3• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

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

gaius2• 17 years ago

More likely Oracle will abandon work on BTRFS now that they have real ZFS.

sneakums2• 17 years 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

nailer2• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

Sure Larry won't mind giving the world one more reason to abandon the Solaris OS he just bought. This is so Larry...

ComputerGuru2• 17 years 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.

Freaky3• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

Dynamically striped mirrors? Is that RAID10?

kailoa3• 17 years ago

The CPU is overkill, but make sure you get a 64-bit CPU. The way ZFS is designed it basically requires as large a mapping as you can get.

ComputerGuru2• 17 years ago

It's difficult to get a non-x64-capable CPU these days :)

catch232• 17 years ago

For the really cheap solution, you can just get a mini-itx atom board, mini-itx case, and a few external usb enclosures for the hard drives. It's what I have at home, running opensolaris on Xen. I mapped the usb drives natively to opensolaris so I'm not creating disk images on each. It's still fast enough to stream movies on. Not counting the external hard drives, it'll probably cost you around $200 for the PC, and about $125 per terabyte (usually around $25 per usb enclosure).

One of the reasons I used Xen is because OpenSolaris still lacks proper network drivers for just about all the network cards I own. It also had issues with my external usb drives, so it was just easier getting linux to handle the hardware interfaces to opensolaris.

I use it as timemachine backups for my macs & media storage... but on a cheap budget.

ciupicri2• 17 years ago

Have you tried/thought about VirtualBox?

pibefision• 17 years ago

have you tried restore a mac from that nas using timemachine?

rjurney4• 17 years 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.

notmyname2• 17 years 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.

rjurney4• 17 years ago

Thanks, that is very interesting. Not ZFS apparently, but that is the product I described.

joshu2• 17 years ago

I am excited about drobo but I've heard too many horror stories.

Freaky3• 17 years ago

FreeNAS has some ZFS support, I believe: "ZFS integration has been done in 0.7, so it is possible to create pools and datasets via WebGUI.", from an old entry at http://freenas.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately ZFS depends on the Solaris fault management daemon (fmd) to handle failing disks by itself, something FreeBSD doesn't yet have a replacement for.

rjurney4• 17 years ago

I can't remember the name, but there is an opensolaris NAS software package. I really want a hardware appliance based on ZFS, though. I'd rather not spend time setting it up.

kailoa3• 17 years ago

http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=11&pid=82...

Thecus 7700 supports ZFS. 7 drive bays though.

rjurney4• 17 years ago

Thanks, but WAY outside of a consumer price range :) Nice to see, though.

notmyname2• 17 years ago

I've build something similar for home/small-office use. My experiences are at http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server. Daz at 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• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

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

Rickasaurus• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

I don't know if anybody is interested in Qnap TS-219, it's green and cheap

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/

Solaris + ZFS = The Perfect Home File/Media Server

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