Yes yes. The nerd in me is anticipating and jumping in joy. The last time I felt like this is when I had to wait for my iMac to come so I could start playing around with OS X. Next Wednesday the parts will come pouring (literally) into my office. We had a bit of a…. data problem… two weeks ago that caused me to basically spend almost 90-100 hours at the office in one week. It wasn’t as if there weren’t any backups its the people responsible over the [tape] backups (a different division, and country… yes you know which one) are not the brightest of the bunch. This caused mass panic and people to whip out POs and credit cards as if it was nothing (age old expression, in Holland at least, “when the calf has drowned, the well is closed”).

So 7 days later and next week I get to create a 6 TB (8 x 750gb drives so 5.8 TB to be exact) backup server running Solaris 10 and ZFS. Both choices were my idea. Reading the ZFS white papers, it sounds like an amazing file system. No more volumes but storage pools and the dependency on hardware raid controllers goes bye bye. Not to mention the file system makes snapshots as well (much more graceful then making snapshots on an UFS or ext3 system). ZFS looks terrific. Furthermore it isn’t endian dependent (Sun calls it endian-neutral) making it easy as pie to move over to a different platform (as ZFS is opensource… who knows where it could end up) if the need arises.

Hopefully I can some pics when building the box. I know… lame… but hey… the nerd in me can’t wait to try out this technology.

More on ZFS:
ZFS: the last word in file systems
Solaris ZFS Administration Guide
ZFS, Sun’s Cutting-Edge File System: (Part 1: Storage Integrity, Security, and Scalability) & (Part 2: Ease of Administration and Future Enhancements)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.