[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana as a production archive service

[Jan Owoc]

Hi Len,


I'm just starting with OpenIndiana, but I can try to answer two of
your questions.


On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Len Zaifman <leonardz at sickkids.ca> wrote:
> 2) Running a file service with ~ 36 disks in three  11 disk (9+2) raidz2 vdevs + hotspares, almost all data will be copied from another fileserver into compressed directories on each of these 2 devices.
>  IS OpenINdiana 151a stable enough to do this with potentially .5-1 TB/day being downloaded?

>From what I have read, oi151a isn't inherently unstable in the same
sense that Debian Sid is unstable. To assess the "stability" for your
needs, I would take a look at the known issues in the release notes
[1] and potentially the list of open issues [2].

[1] http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/oi_151a+Release+Notes
[2] https://www.illumos.org/projects/openindiana/issues



> 3) Any recommendations (keeping in mind we are going to use gzip compressed file systems) for number/speed of cores and ram???

Gzip compression, while fast, will likely saturate any CPU before the
HDDs get saturated. With current Xeons/Opterons, you can expect to
saturate Fast Ethernet, but not Gigabit Ethernet, on writes.
Decompressing (for reads) is generally an order of magnitude faster.

For memory, the more the better. No less than 4GB. If using
deduplication, ~2GB/TB of unique file data [3].

[3] http://blogs.oracle.com/roch/entry/dedup_performance_considerations1


> We run commercial (solaris) ZFS systems and are happy with them.

To better answer question 3, you could look at the specs on your
production Solaris ZFS system - OI's implementation of ZFS should be
very similar, and you can expect similar performance.


Jan