zfs send & receive ... Send snapshots around like a fancy SAN.
raidz (N+1 - like raid5)
raidz2 (N+2 - like raid6)
raidz3 (N+3)
It's also way faster and cheaper to put together boxes from commodity enterprise server hardware, making hardware raid cards basically expensive shelf dust catchers along with overpriced SANs and NASes.
(Extra shout out for iXsystems, not because they use lots of Python, but because of massive awesomeness supporting FreeBSD and FreeNAS. Also their parties put Defcon afterparties to shame.)
Conclusion: Full ZFS is often better than a SAN, NAS and/or hardware solutions. Also protip: Direct attached is way, way faster than 10 GbE, FC or IB, especially if images are directly available to compute nodes.
L2ARC, zil can each have their own volume configuration (mirror, etc.) For example, using different types of SSDs for each. http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/zfs-and-ssd-cach...
zfs send & receive ... Send snapshots around like a fancy SAN.
raidz (N+1 - like raid5) raidz2 (N+2 - like raid6) raidz3 (N+3)
It's also way faster and cheaper to put together boxes from commodity enterprise server hardware, making hardware raid cards basically expensive shelf dust catchers along with overpriced SANs and NASes.
(Extra shout out for iXsystems, not because they use lots of Python, but because of massive awesomeness supporting FreeBSD and FreeNAS. Also their parties put Defcon afterparties to shame.)
Conclusion: Full ZFS is often better than a SAN, NAS and/or hardware solutions. Also protip: Direct attached is way, way faster than 10 GbE, FC or IB, especially if images are directly available to compute nodes.