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Date: Thu, 31 May 2012 11:39:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dennis Glatting <dg@pki2.com>
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To: Kaya Saman <kayasaman@gmail.com>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, Oscar Hodgson <oscar.hodgson@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Anyone using freebsd ZFS for large storage servers?
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On Thu, 31 May 2012, Kaya Saman wrote:

> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 5:05 PM, Oscar Hodgson <oscar.hodgson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> That helps.  Thank you.
>>
>> This is an academic departmental instructional / research environment.
>>  We had a great relationship with Sun, they provided great
>> opportunities to put Solaris in front of students.  Oracle, not so
>> much, and the Oracle single-tier support model simply isn't affordable
>> for this "business" (there's no ROI at the departmental level <g>).
>> Solaris is not a viable option.
>
> We found Oracle to be the cheapest out of all the solutions we looked
> at: Netapp, MSI, et el.....
>
>>
>> FreeBSD looks like the next best available option at the moment,
>> particularly considering the use of the storage heads as compute
>> machines.  OpenIndiana shows promise.  Nexenta has a great product,
>> but the user community expects more flexibility in software options.
>
> FreeBSD is better then Linux in my opinion though lacking some
> software and multimedia functionality that Linux has and not for the
> Desktop as it's not as "bleeding edge" as say Fedora 16, however, if
> FreeBSD offered Gnome3 and supported my wireless NIC I'd be all over
> it like a "bad rash" :-)
>
>>
>> Is there anything like a list of "supported" (known good) SAS HBA's?
>
> LSI HBA's are really good!
>
> For my DIY solution at home I used a SuperMicro system board with
> non-RAID LSI HBA.......
>

Similarly:

mc => Tyan S8812WGM3NR
iirc => Supermicro H8DGi
bd3 => Soon another Supermicro H8DGi

Others are consumer boards from Gigabyte (preferred).

I also have a small collection of Supermicro AOC-USAS2-L8i boards. 
Generally, I have had no trouble but ESXi 5.0 hated them.

For work I looked at two Supermicro 848A chassis with a H8QGL board and 20 
3TB disks for two different projects, but they lie in limbo.


> It is a similar solution that we will use for our test NAS at work
> though we already have a Dell R700 series server. For this setup
> however I will need to use an LSI HBA with both internal and external
> Mini-SAS ports.
>
> Instead of Promise we will use NetStor JBOD solutions as they work
> with 6Gbps drives and overall give better performance.
>
>>
>> Oscar
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Kaya
>
>>
>> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Kaya Saman <kayasaman@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> If this is any consellation I run a 36TB cluster using a self built
>>> server with a Promise DAS (VessJBOD 1840) using ZFS at home! to
>>> support my OpenSource projects and personal files.
>>>
>>> As for OS take your pick: NexentaStor, FreeBSD, Solaris 11
>>>
>>>
>>> All capable, of course Solaris has latest version of ZFS but still.....
>>>
>>>
>>> At work we're looking into getting a StorEdge appliance wich will
>>> handle up to 140+ TB.
>>>
>>>
>>> I am also in charge of redesigning one of our virtual SAN's to a
>>> FreeBSD ZFS storage system which will run.... well how many JBOD's can
>>> you fit on the system?? Probably round ~100TB or so.....
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>>
>>> Kaya
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 4:32 PM, Oscar Hodgson <oscar.hodgson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> The subject is pretty much the question.  Perhaps there's a better
>>>> place to be asking this question ...
>>>>
>>>> We have (very briefly) discussed the possibility of using FreeBSD
>>>> pizza boxes as a storage heads direct attached to external JBOD arrays
>>>> with ZFS.  In perusing the list, I haven't stumbled across indications
>>>> of people actually doing this.  External JBODs would be running 24 to
>>>> 48TB each, roughly.  There would be a couple of units.  The pizza
>>>> boxes would be used for computational tasks, and nominally would have
>>>> 8 cores and 96G+ RAM.
>>>>
>>>> Obvious questions are hardware compatibility and stability.  I've set
>>>> up small FreeBSD 9 machines with ZFS roots and simple mirrors for
>>>> other tasks here, and those have been successful so far.
>>>>
>>>> Observations would be appreciated.
>>>>
>>>> Oscar.
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
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