Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:55:00 -0500 From: Eric Anderson <anderson@freebsd.org> To: Patrick Tracanelli <eksffa@freebsdbrasil.com.br> Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Xsan (Apple) on FreeBSD Message-ID: <46B1E234.7010005@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <46B1D167.4030206@freebsdbrasil.com.br> References: <46B0F505.8090102@freebsdbrasil.com.br> <a969fbd10708011502n5dd8034m7cc0abef3a62c5e6@mail.gmail.com> <46B10798.5050504@freebsdbrasil.com.br> <200708011536.37926.matt@ixsystems.com> <46B12D0C.20808@freebsd.org> <46B1D167.4030206@freebsdbrasil.com.br>
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Patrick Tracanelli wrote: > Eric Anderson wrote: >> Matt Olander wrote: >>> On Wednesday 01 August 2007 3:22 pm, Patrick Tracanelli wrote: >>>> Hello Jeff, >>>> >>>> Jeff Mohler wrote: >>>>> Im yet to hear of a large Xsan install that stayed Xsan once it grew. >>>>> >>>>> Most, if not all, have gone to netapp or umm..Isilon (spelling) >>>>> that ive >>>>> been close to. Latest large dump of Xsan that I know of was >>>>> Current TV >>>>> in San Francisco, for Isilon. >>>> Hmm, good to know. I have tested XServe RAID only, which has shown >>>> to be >>>> a good solution as storage system for the usage profile I need, but >>>> Xsan, never saw it working. Believed it to be the usual path to follow, >>>> but have hear of people running Stornext instead of xsan. >>>> >>>> So, now my question goes on a different path. Will Isilon OneFS run >>>> FreeBSD? I head from people at Zoic Studios it is based on FreeBSD, but >>>> I am not sure how true this information is. Anyway, "based on" wont >>>> always mean fully compatible. >>>> >>>> Are you aware of OneFS running on FreeBSD? >>> >>> It is indeed true. OneFS is FreeBSD. The Isilon product is really >>> neat and you can buy it modularly, starting with just one unit. >> >> To be clear, OneFS isn't a solution to add to FreeBSD - it is an >> all-in-one solution, that happens to be built with FreeBSD (or parts >> of it anyway). It's like a NetApp. You don't run NetApp on FreeBSD, >> you use whatever clients you want, and they connect *to* Isilon or >> NetApp. As far as I understand, they are all just NFS/CIFS/iSCSI >> servers/targets. There's really no solution for sharing a SAN block >> device safely using FreeBSD (using the same blocks with the same fs). >> That would require a clustered filesystem, and there is no such beast >> for FreeBSD at this point. Simultaneous read-write activity from >> different hosts to the same file system leads to Bad Stuff. > > Hello Eric, > > Thank you for clearing up some things. I believed OneFS to be an > extension the the file system which would allow shared access. So, OneFS > seem to be exclusively used by the appliance itself, as you mention. > > FreeBSD unfortunately don't have a shared file system (it would be a > solution to this matter, combining a shared FS with ggate and gmirror, > or using a central gvirstor/zfs storage solution, 100% FreeBSD-only). It > really is a missing piece of feature which would boost usage/combination > of many other ones. Agreed - I've been beating that drum for some time. It's a *lot* of work, and not enough developers/money to do it right now. > I dont know about iSCSI support on FreeBSD. A quick research on the > archieves seem to show that there is no iSCSI support at this time. So There is iSCSI support, and -CURRENT recently got an iSCSI initiator in the base system. The iSCSI target is in the ports collection. This doesn't fix the issue, as it's still a block device transport. > NFS/CIFS and something like that would the option? In this case, a > FreeBSD solution seem a lot more flexible than a storage appliance. In > fact I run NFS today, but performance is becoming a problem as the usage > increases. I have never used CIFS on Unix-to-Unix enviroment, and I dont > believe it to be better than NFS anyway. But maybe I should give it a > try. Is there any other CIFS implementation other than Samba? Samba just > happen to have so many features Ill never need in this enviroment. Is > there any chance it will perform better than NFS? NFS will beat CIFS in performance almost always. NFS is a commonly used protocol for shared file access, and should perform fairly well. If you are hitting NFS performance issues, you might want to dig there first, since there are things that you can do to improve your performance, depending on your usage. It may in fact be that NFS itself is not the bottleneck for you. > BTW, what about NFS4? Is performance improvement a goal, or just > security/kerberos/auth stuff? I have been running NFS4 with gssd, which > shall decrease performance. Ill do some benching without gssd comparing > to NFS3. I'm not certain. NFS does ok in general for performance as a protocol - often it is other factors that make it 'slow'. >> I'd love to learn more about OneFS and the FreeBSD integration from >> someone at Isilon. It's a great success story that would be great to >> boast about on the FreeBSD website. > > I have contacted Isilon regarding FreeBSD usage and possibilities. If I > hear good news from someone there, maybe it is a conversation to start > on advocacy@. Great! Keep us all posted on what you learn. Eric
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