ZFS Rocks

I am a great fan of ZFS. With Sun Fire X4500, you will see the benefit of having ZFS to virtualise all the disks and have the best protection without having to worry about lost of data like silent data corruption. BTW, I blogged about ZFS and X4500 a lot in the past. With ZFS and OpenSolaris, Sun Microsystems is trying to make Solaris as the platform for storage.

Those interested to implement ZFS should read this ZFS Best Practice Guide. As for most of my implementations, I prefer to do it this way,

• use 2 disks (from different controller) to be mirrored with SVM (Solaris Volume Manager)
• the rest of the 46 disks in one zpool
• raidz (raid-5 equivalent) group of 6 disks across all the controllers
• strip across 7 raidz groups
• 4 disks as spare
• you will get 16TB usable space in a 24TB raw box
• weekly zfs scrub in crontab to examine all data and verify checksum

BTW, Sun Fire X4500 has 6 controllers and the below is my disk layout.

If you configure probably, you don't even have to open up the box to replace any hard disk for the life time of the Sun Fire X4500, hopefully.

Below videos will definitely show off ZFS:
ZFS is Smashing Baby

CSI:Munich