[rescue] OS for ZFS?

Eric Railine erailine at gmail.com
Mon Mar 25 13:43:41 CDT 2013


Heh.  That should be effectively for $*2*50, not $350....


On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Eric Railine <erailine at gmail.com> wrote:

> Related: the HP N54L Microserver (newer version of the N40L) is a
> Shellshocker deal on NewEgg today for $299.99 & a $50 rebate card (so
> effectively for $350).
>
> These are very nice machines, and mine is running with 16G of RAM & 3 NICs
> (dual PCIe slots) quite happily (though I'm not running Nexenta or other
> ZFS implementation currently).
>
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107921
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Robert Novak <rnovak at indyramp.com> wrote:
>
>> I've run NexentaStor Community Edition (free, supports up to 16TB or 18TB
>> of storage) on a Dell deskside workstation/server (SC430, single core
>> Pentium or Celeron, 4GB RAM, two 1TB sata disks plus a flash drive for
>> OS).
>> Not enough RAM to do dedupe, but it was pretty viable for mount points and
>> such..
>>
>> NexentaStor is built on descendants of Solaris, so Zachary would probably
>> be relatively comfortable with it. And they do regular development on it
>> so
>> it's not a dead platform.
>>
>> If you can bump your Dell up to 4GB or more, and make sure the drive
>> controller is supported (see http://zfs.bz/NexentaHSL for details), you
>> can
>> probably get a bit done with it.
>>
>> If you really want to work on ZFS with all its features and want to put
>> some money behind the effort, you can probably get a fairly substantial
>> dedupe-able box with a HP Microserver, 8 or 16GB or RAM, and NexentaStor
>> or
>> the like. That'd set you back about $350+drives. Maybe less on your
>> favorite online source for used hardware. There are some nice hack options
>> on the hardware side on that machine as well (add 4-6 hard drives, esata
>> cards, fc mode, etc).
>>
>> Hope this helps. (No formal affiliation with Nexenta, although a friend is
>> Global TME there.)
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Zachary Giles <zgiles at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Honestly, I still dont trust ZFS on anything but Solaris /
>> > OpenSolaris. Maybe I need to get over that, but I don't like to lose
>> > data :)
>> > Others thoughts on that?
>> >
>> > On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
>> > > On 25 Mar 2013, at 12:50, "Scott Newell" <newell+rescue at n5tnl.com>
>> > wrote:
>> > >
>> > >>
>> > >> I'm wanting to build a (headless) machine to play with ZFS.  It
>> won't be
>> > > doing much--light duty file server, some monitoring scripts, rsync
>> > backups of
>> > > our VPS, etc.  Looking through the junk pile here at work, I see an
>> > Ultra 60
>> > > (2 CPU, 1 or 2 GB ram, couple of drives) or an old Dell Precision
>> > workstation
>> > > (2.8GHz P4, 512 MB, couple of old SATA drives).  Does either feel
>> like a
>> > > viable candidate?
>> > >>
>> > >> Any recommendations on an OS?  I've run OpenBSD and debian on them
>> > before,
>> > > so I don't anticipate driver problems.
>> > >
>> > > RAM will be an issue if you want to do say, deduplication but
>> otherwise
>> > you
>> > > should be fine with the Ultra 60 for basic ZFS stuff I believe.  ZFS
>> > won't
>> > > even let you enable it on 512M RAM in BSDs if I recall correctly.
>> > >
>> > >>
>> > >>
>> > >> thanks!
>> > >> newell  N5TNL
>> > >> _______________________________________________
>> > >> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>> > > _______________________________________________
>> > > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Zach Giles
>> > zgiles at gmail.com
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>> _______________________________________________
>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue


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