USENIX held their annual Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference this year in Nashville, Tennessee. 2018 marks the 32nd consecutive year of LISA! The main event ran from Monday, October 29th to Tuesday, October 30th with additional talks for attendees on the Wednesday after the exhibit hall closed.

MeetBSD California 2018 took place October 19th and 20th and succeeded once again at bringing together many of the biggest names in the BSD community in an informal, low-stress environment. True to its UnConference roots, MeetBSD 2018 offered a mix of formal talks and audience-participation activities, including Lightning Talks, OpenZFS and Virtualization Panels, and Breakout Sessions. MeetBSD 2018 also stayed true to its Silicon Valley/Bay Area roots, attracting attendees from the region and around the world.

The recent release of TrueNAS®11.1-U6 introduces a new built-in service that seamlessly integrates with Asigra Backup software. With this integration, an existing TrueNAS® system can be configured as backing storage for Asigra backup clients while simultaneously performing all the responsibilities of a traditional network attached storage system.

Ohio Linux Fest 2018 was held in Columbus at the Hyatt Regency. Warren Block, Dru Lavigne, and JT Pennington attended from iXsystems and staffed the FreeBSD booth in the expo area.

The iXsystems team descended upon the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)’s Storage Developer Conference last week in full force. SDC is an unrelenting technical conference, packed full of technical sessions, keynotes, Birds of a Feather events, at least one plugfest running throughout, and a very active hallway track. This year, we presented two technical sessions, led two Birds of a Feather sessions, and participated in the SMB plugfest. 

In the first post, we discussed the importance of planning the ZFS pool layout which has a huge impact on how the system performs. To quantify this performance, we are looking at six key metrics: read I/O operations per second (IOPS), write IOPS, streaming read speed, streaming write speed, storage space efficiency (usable space after parity/total raw space), and fault tolerance (maximum number of drives that can fail before data loss).

The iXsystems Team travels to Bucharest, Romania to attend EuroBSDcon 2018. Like other BSD conferences, there was a two-day DevSummit followed by a two-day conference.

The layout of a ZFS storage pool has a significant impact on system performance under various workloads. Given the importance of picking the right configuration for your workload and the fact that making changes to an in-use ZFS pool is far from trivial, it is important for an administrator to understand the mechanics of pool performance when designing a storage system.