http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup

Quote :

"You knew this day was coming: ZFS now has built-in deduplication. "

i knew this day was coming.

holy shit, yes. this is awesome.

11/3/2009 1:37:21 AM

So ... does this put Solaris on par with otherwise massive EMC / Netapp / etc. systems, or am I missing something else altogether?

11/3/2009 7:37:05 AM

in terms of dedicated filers, the sun stuff isn't on the same level as companies like compellant, xiotech, netapp, etc as far as functionality in a nice dense box. you can, however, run almost all of this stuff for free on top of whitebox storage and get a good number of features for $free.99

11/3/2009 11:12:43 AM

Now that you can get a NetApp FAS2020 (12x300GB SAS) for $10K, it doesn't make much sense to go whitebox, as much as I like Openfiler.

[Edited on November 3, 2009 at 1:13 PM. Reason : .]

11/3/2009 1:13:02 PM

I was a fan of DataDomain until they got aquired by EMC. We'll have to see what they do with it, they're hella expensive though.

11/3/2009 1:45:34 PM

^^with netapp anything you're tied to a support contract on what amounts to little more than off the shelf drives. why pay that cost in addition to the storage admins you keep on staff?

11/3/2009 3:20:46 PM

^

11/3/2009 3:37:10 PM

A 3 year standard support agreement with 4hr replacement and on-site install included for $10K doesn't sound like they're twisting your arm. Most companies like the option to get their SAN vendor on the phone if needed as a CYA also. I'm definitely biased as I have had nothing but great experiences working with FAS devices, but I also run Openfiler on whiteboxes where appropriate - but when they start offering the 2020 for this cheap, it's hard to say no.

And yes, dedup on ZFS is a nice feature to see supported.

11/3/2009 4:57:56 PM

that's what, 3TB of usable space for $10k?

that's still quite a bit expensive

and yes, it's nice to have on-site support contracts... and i can see that being useful for smaller companies... but if you get large enough, you employ people that can support the equipment much more efficiently than waiting for a vendor to arrive... or you just keep a rep from the vendor on-site all the time

i'm running opensolaris with ZFS (and COMSTAR for iSCSI and FC targets) on top of an HP EVA for second-tier storage and i have people telling me it's faster than their netapp-backed san space.

11/3/2009 5:03:39 PM

to be fair, the speed claims are probly due to utilization

11/3/2009 11:24:16 PM

It's not just about space. That 2020 PFVega is talking about is both a SAN (FC and IP) and NAS that does dedupe, thin provisioning, and Snapshots right out of the box. If you want big dumb disk then an EVA is pretty fast, but NetApp has systems that can go just as fast if you configure them right. Check out the SpecFS numbers on the 24 node 6070 GX cluster...over 1M ops/s.

I'm not biased or anything though

11/6/2009 2:18:15 PM

the only thing netapp really has going for them are pam cards. the rest is some johnny come lately shit that they bought from spinnaker that's taken WAY WAY WAY too long to integrate with nothing coming for another year

11/6/2009 7:00:21 PM

^^that's where an opensolaris head comes in

EVAs are indeed dumb as hell, but fast. you can't argue with 96 spindles.
the opensolaris head i have serving everything does all of that: dedupe, thin provisioning, snapshots (snapclones), etc.
it's also a NAS, ZFS makes it ridiculously easy to share over cifs and nfs.
not to mention with the COMSTAR framework, it's a damn good iSCSI/FC/FCoE target.

11/6/2009 9:52:28 PM

Only 96 spindles? Every system NetApp sells except the 2020 supports more than that. And just like a lot of other systems out there, to get NAS (or really any intelligence) on an EVA you have to put another box in front of it.

Not knocking ZFS though, I think it's a great FS. Unfortunate for Sun that their management has no idea how to market products to actually make money. I can see that changing in a couple years though now that Oracle is running the show.

As for Spinnaker, yeah I think it surprised a lot of people how much more difficult it was to converge the SpinOS and ONTAP code trees and therefore took longer than planned. But I wouldn't say it's too late, there aren't many other companies out there offering what it does and will offer over the next year. People are still buying NetApp boxes every day of the week and most are still doing it based on what 7.x has to offer over the competition, so I wouldn't say 8.0 and PAM are the only things NetApp has going for them.

Didn't mean to derail the thread away from ZFS though...

11/7/2009 8:05:24 AM

^^ EVA snapshots are not the same as NetApp snapshots. Check the WAFL FS for more info...
A whitebox SAN may suit some end users needs, but not in top tier storage systems/needs. Service contracts are necessities for large firms. You don't want your Storage team to have to run out to Tiger direct, every time one of your SATA drives fails.. and if you have a FC/SAS drive fail? Good luck finding that locally on your 24/7 SAN.

[Edited on November 8, 2009 at 4:47 PM. Reason : .....]

11/8/2009 4:45:08 PM

^holy mother of god, can you people not read?

i'm not doing shit with the EVA except presenting LUNs to opensolaris. ZFS does the snapshots, and they're true snapclones. i'm quite aware of WAFL and its benefits, but thanks.
i'm not saying to not get service contracts, i'm saying that you don't need fucking on-site service that EMC and NetApp require. send me a drive next-day air and let me replace it myself.

11/8/2009 8:29:27 PM

Just FYI...not 100% sure about EMC but I think it's the same as NetApp: you aren't required to pay for onsite service. The $10k FAS2020 mentioned above is with warranty support (doesn't cost anything) which is 3 years of just what you mentioned, a drive showing up on your desk the next day after it dies.

It's cool to hear what people are doing with OpenSolaris though. Cheap way to add some real functionality to dumb disks.

11/9/2009 7:32:13 AM

coraid http://www.coraid.com/ + falconstor http://www.falconstor.com/en/pages/?pn=NSS +
consumer grade 1TB sata disks + some SSDs or ( http://storage.dataram.com/products-and-services/storage if you got loot )

11/9/2009 9:24:46 AM