choosing a file system

[Pascal Gienger]

Robert Banz <rob at nofocus.org> wrote:

> At my last job, we had explored a Dell/EMC SAN at one point. Those
> folks don't seem to understand the idea that Fibre Channel is a well
> established standard -- they only expect you to connect their
> supported stack of hardware and software, otherwise they don't wanna
> talk.

Regarding to support as described by the support contract you are right - 
but I had many EMC big iron SAN devices running without a problem with 
Solaris 10. You have to adapt scsi_vhci.conf if you want symmetric 
multipathing as Sun does not recognize many of the FC devices which can 
handle symmetric links out there.

ZFS with SAN devices is perfectly OK. We have 33 million files on our 
(single!) ZFS mail pool, running gzip compression (Solaris 10 Patch 
137137-09 resp. 137138-09). Our Tivoli Storage Manager backup (tsm) runs 
every night for three hours approximately. Within this 3 hours it does scan 
all files. We do a zfs snapshot every day and we are holding 14 days 
snapshots to restore mailboxes. We are not conservatice enough to run scrub 
regularly, the last time I did was last week, without any error.

A happy and successful 2009 for all of you!

Pascal
-- 
Pascal Gienger
pascal at southbrain.com
http://southbrain.com/