Comments on: Building A Backblaze Storage Pod

By: Roger Pickering

Roger Pickering — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:17:52 +0000

Thanks so much for the article! I am very much interested in this system, but need to know if it will work as is with Solaris. I very much like the ZFS fs and would use this in a tiered system so my fast secondary tier would be an Oracle data server.

One, perhaps dumb, question, assuming it works with Solaris, is: can I put several boxes into one ZFS pool? That would allow me to have files much larger than the 120 TB otherwise (assuming RAIDZ2 with two spares and one SSD cache).

Thanks in advance!

Roger

By: syle

syle — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:55:14 +0000

Isn’t that the point to begin with, not to have to have the pain to have to login to a box and “figure out what slot”, then “figure out what command to run on that slot”,
should be able to pull it out, stick new one in, and have it do this automatically.

By: Butch

Butch — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:23:10 +0000

With regards to ZFS not handling drive removal well, that may be more a driver support issue at the time. I’ve used ZFS on several Solaris systems with known supported controllers and have had no such issues. You may have to run cfgadm -C configure on the specific “slot” to reconfigure the drive first, but as long as the OS can communicate properly with the controller there shouldn’t be any problems.

By: Ronald Duncan

Ronald Duncan — Sat, 15 May 2010 12:15:52 +0000

About 6 years ago, we build a collection of 5 Terrabyte servers, since then we have used EMC SAN’s and other large disk arrays.

We are off to start building our own again. The main issue for us is a nice form of clustering, since we want to mirror the data across datacentres. Speed is not an issue at the moment since this if for our 2nd level backups, but if we could get it fast then we could use it for other things.

It just needs to be mountable as NFS.

A more complex software stack is http://www.openfiler.com/ and I would be interested in people’s experience with open filler.

We tested out ZFS, and it did not cope with simple things like pulling a drive out and putting it back in. If you pull the drive out it goes into degraded mode, but it does not recognise the drive coming back in and you have a whole lot of pain to remount the drive and then rebuild things using the drive. Fine testing locally, but no use for someone that is likely to pull out the wrong drive in a remote data centre.

How have you got on with building so far, since we would like to build a couple of servers immediately.

All the best
Ronald

By: Nilay

Nilay — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:14:50 +0000

Very cool! We haven’t had a chance to load up Solaris & ZFS on our pod… Debian + JFS + mdadm has been very reliable for us, but we are always curious to see if there is a better way to do it.

We’ll keep our eyes on your blog… and definitely keep us updated on your progress!

– Nilay