We are doing some preliminary searching/quoting for a larger storage system. We presently use a self-built 24bay Supermicro FreeNAS box, dual-x5650, 96gb ram, 10Gbe, running as 11-mirrored vdevs with redundant SLOGs. Performance is good (not great) over NFS. The big wins for me have been the stability, snapshotting, scrubbing, main ZFS features. Even with the relatively older hardware, it has been great.
The challenge for us is storage space and scalability. I know the "Z" stands for "zettabyte", but my concern/question is in the number of drives. Using 4TB drives, in Z2 4+2 vdevs, we're talking about 200 disks for a half-petabyte array. That is sort of our target scale we're exploring. All of the SPOF issues aside; does anyone have any insight into a large (like 200+ disk) array? Our debate is between a ZFS array and a Ceph cluster. A similar capacity Ceph cluster would end up being 20+ separate servers (big $$$) difference.
We would definitely get in touch with IXsystems before purchasing anything at this scale, which is still a ways off, curious if anyone in the community has any thoughts.
Thanks
The challenge for us is storage space and scalability. I know the "Z" stands for "zettabyte", but my concern/question is in the number of drives. Using 4TB drives, in Z2 4+2 vdevs, we're talking about 200 disks for a half-petabyte array. That is sort of our target scale we're exploring. All of the SPOF issues aside; does anyone have any insight into a large (like 200+ disk) array? Our debate is between a ZFS array and a Ceph cluster. A similar capacity Ceph cluster would end up being 20+ separate servers (big $$$) difference.
We would definitely get in touch with IXsystems before purchasing anything at this scale, which is still a ways off, curious if anyone in the community has any thoughts.
Thanks