[rescue] Filesystem choice for fileserver?

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 18, 2008, at 16:31 , Ron Wickersham wrote:

> i'm also planning to put a ZFS file server together (an E450 so i'll  
> have
> good disk bandwidth) and have read lots (but certainly not all) of the
> Sun blogs and papers on ZFS.   there were several recommendations to  
> use
> JBOD because this ensures that the ZFS does its job and that when  
> you use
> other software or hardware RAID you don't get the full ZFS advantage  
> for
> bit-rot and other features that ensure data integrity.     so after a
> failure, the other software or hardware RAID system makes sure that  
> the
> copies are consistent (in the case of full mirror, both copies will be
> identical even if both have errors) and ZFS can't fix the error if i  
> understand the point correctly.

This is partially true for current Solaris releases, and not true in  
the near future.

Current official releases of ZFS have redundant metadata blocks, so  
they can correct filesystem data corruption even on a single drive.

Future releases of ZFS, which I believe only exist in the Nevada/ 
Indiana releases right now, will let you have data redundancy as well.

Once this is done or you download one of the "beta" versions of  
Solaris, then ZFS will be able to correct errors even without RAID and  
multiple drives.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com