Solaris + ZFS = The Perfect Home File/Media Server | Hacker News Reader

Solaris + ZFS = The Perfect Home File/Media Server

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47 pointsj2d238 comments

Good setup, but way too expensive for what adds up to a highly-advanced NAS.

I don't at all disagree with the OpenSolaris/ZFS assessment, but the hardware is a bit on the heavy side. You really don't need that server motherboard (knock 100 dollars off the price). The CPU is also overkill, and ECC RAM isn't necessary though at that price it's not exactly a bad idea either.

The remaining cost is just HDs - you can knock one off the list if you use RAID-Z instead of RAID-Z2 and remember to replace a drive as soon as it goes bad.

OpenSolaris itself doesn't need a full 320GBs for the OS and its software: an 80GB hard drive will suffice and then some.

I think ECC memory is a good idea if you can get it; turning memory errors from "random data corruption and crashes" into "harmless fmd/syslog messages" is pretty nice, and last time I looked, would add about £5 to a 4GB DDR2 system.

Of course the problem then is that Intel don't support ECC on anything but Xeons; AMD are rather better, all you need is a supporting motherboard (which includes some cheap and cheerful integrated ones), any AMD CPU in the past few years will do.

Now, if only Intel would get off their arses and release the W3xxx Xeons so I can build an ECC protected i7 system. 12GB without ECC is getting a bit ridiculous.

I'd also go for a pair of dynamically striped mirrors instead of RAID-Z2; modern disks can already pretty much saturate GigE individually, so I'd rather go for increased overall IOPS rather than increased sequential throughput at the cost of making every drive take part in each IO.

Dynamically striped mirrors? Is that RAID10?

Yup, pretty much; if you have more than one vdev in a pool (mirror, RAIDZ, whatever), ZFS will stripe over them, varying what goes where depending on how fast it thinks they are.

I've heard reports of ZFS doing things like putting more data on one vdev because the disks underlying it had 16MB of cache and those in the other vdev only had 8MB; bit fancier than what you normally associate with RAID10.

The CPU is overkill, but make sure you get a 64-bit CPU. The way ZFS is designed it basically requires as large a mapping as you can get.

It's difficult to get a non-x64-capable CPU these days :)

For the really cheap solution, you can just get a mini-itx atom board, mini-itx case, and a few external usb enclosures for the hard drives. It's what I have at home, running opensolaris on Xen. I mapped the usb drives natively to opensolaris so I'm not creating disk images on each. It's still fast enough to stream movies on. Not counting the external hard drives, it'll probably cost you around $200 for the PC, and about $125 per terabyte (usually around $25 per usb enclosure).

One of the reasons I used Xen is because OpenSolaris still lacks proper network drivers for just about all the network cards I own. It also had issues with my external usb drives, so it was just easier getting linux to handle the hardware interfaces to opensolaris.

I use it as timemachine backups for my macs & media storage... but on a cheap budget.

Have you tried/thought about VirtualBox?

I used Xen because I know it well. I'm sure it would probably work with VirtualBox or dozens of other virtualization platforms.

I see... but unfortunately Xen dom0 has becoming unavailable in the latest Linux distributions, e.g. Fedora and Ubuntu. Also Red Hat seems that it will go with KVM in its next version.

have you tried restore a mac from that nas using timemachine?

I love ZFS. I was on the mailing list for a year just to watch it develop. It is amazing. I love Solaris. When I deploy applications on it I get warm and fuzzies.

I've used ZFS + Solaris at home and with Sun hardware in several companies for 'appliance' servers that we deployed on-site in remote locations. We were able to achieve reliable storage on a 1U server without paying for a RAID card. It was great. ZFS is great for the budget. Now I want it at home.

But where's the simple appliance to do this? For a home fileserver I just want a small box large enough to hold 4 disks, and I want it to set me up a RAID-Z or mirrored ZFS when I pop them in, and serve them via all the common methods I pick via a simple web interface.

Why has nobody done this? I've looked, and the only ZFS 'storage appliances' are software packages.

At present I have a RAID-1 mirror on cheap external drives on a mac mini, and I KNOW the array will degrade within a couple years. Has always happened to me with software RAID. ZFS would be great, but there is no such appliance. (And yes, I tried the patch to make OS X write to ZFS... so slow it virtually locked the system).

Please, someone: build this. It will be a great product. You can offer much better storage reliability than can cheap RAID with ZFS.

It sounds like what you are looking for is a Drobo (www.drobo.com). It has some shortcomings, but it is great for dead-simple backups that protect against hard drive failure.

Thanks, that is very interesting. Not ZFS apparently, but that is the product I described.

I am excited about drobo but I've heard too many horror stories.

What kind of horror stories?

I am looking for something like this instead of tape backups. I looked at some NAS devices that hold five drives and seem pretty robust. One of the devices can mirror itself to another NAS over the network so you can have two separate places to store your data and not have a hardware failure of one device kill the other.(one exception would be the case where the master device gets degraded to the point where bad data is being written to it and then propagates the changes to the other device. I don't know how likely this failure situation is though.)

I've just heard whispers of data loss bugs more than a few times. I recommend some searching.

I think the dual NAS idea is a good one; I'm considering it.

I do crave a higher bandwidth connection to disk.

I wish OS X would ship with ZFS. A mac mini + zfs + JBOD seems fascinating.

FreeNAS has some ZFS support, I believe: "ZFS integration has been done in 0.7, so it is possible to create pools and datasets via WebGUI.", from an old entry at http://freenas.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately ZFS depends on the Solaris fault management daemon (fmd) to handle failing disks by itself, something FreeBSD doesn't yet have a replacement for.

I can't remember the name, but there is an opensolaris NAS software package. I really want a hardware appliance based on ZFS, though. I'd rather not spend time setting it up.

Were you thinking of Nexenta http://www.nexenta.org/os ? They use the OpenSolaris kernel with their own GNU/Debian linux distribution.

http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=11&pid=82...

Thecus 7700 supports ZFS. 7 drive bays though.

Thanks, but WAY outside of a consumer price range :) Nice to see, though.

I've build something similar for home/small-office use. My experiences are at http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server. Daz at http://sigtar.com/ has done similar things as well, and I've found his site to be invaluable as I have built my file server.

Thanks for the links... You've made my day with that ACL rule.

I had the new file permissions issue but hadn't had time to hunt down the solution.

This looks nice, but $1300 seems a little overkill for a home file server! (unless it's a home office?)

About half of that is the cost of the drives. That's not going to change no matter which solution you get.

Compared to the 4-bay $500 Drobo, (plus $200 for DroboShare) it's not bad considering he's getting exactly what he wants.

The trade off is that he has to maintain the Solaris box, and the size/footprint of the overall solution.

^^ Yeah but realistically it's filled with 90% pirated material. At $15-$20 per movie, $10-$15 per CD, $20-$30 for HD, it's still a bargain.

Hopefully acquiring Sun will accelerate Oracle's work on btrfs, and we Linux users can get our own copy-on-write system.

More likely Oracle will abandon work on BTRFS now that they have real ZFS.

Yeah, if I were Oracle I'd definitely throw away a native Linux filesystem in the late stages of development and start porting some goofy jock-ware from an alien kernel. But I'm not Oracle and so they're foolishly carrying on with their insane scheme: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/2880

Oracle have said that Solaris is the main reason they bought Sun.

Nothing I have said contradicts this.

Source?

Doubt it:

"""Theodore Ts'o, developer of ext3 and ext4 filesystems, said that Btrfs “has a number of the same design ideas that Reiser4 had” and that “the filesystem format has support for some advanced features that are designed to leapfrog ZFS.”""

Sure Larry won't mind giving the world one more reason to abandon the Solaris OS he just bought. This is so Larry...

I've had a lot of success with ZFS in FreeBSD running on some very old hardware with a small ram upgrade and a stack of SATA hard disks.

I did try OpenSolaris first but it didn't like my old hardware.

I don't know if anybody is interested in Qnap TS-219, it's green and cheap

http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs

It uses an arm based 1.2GHz CPU with 512MB memory, it is officially supported by Debian:

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/

there was a similar post on nerdblog recently: http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html

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