ServeTheHome.com

One thing that virtually every major storage player and enterprise has been using for the past few years, and is continuing to use, is a tiered storage approach. This is mainly due to the fact that lower capacity, higher-cost drives tend to have higher performance than larger and less expensive alternatives. The basic premise is to have the most frequently used data stored in the fastest accessible physical storage so that more transactional requests can be accomplished quickly. Augmenting this fast storage is lower cost, high-capacity storage that keeps less frequently stored data online. This guide is meant to be a primer on how this works in a few common scenarios for small businesses and home servers. It should be noted that for home servers primarily storing media files, tiered storage makes less sense since waiting a second or two extra to do hours of relatively low bandwidth sequential transfers is not taxing on storage subsystems. Read the full story

This is a simple guide to creating a VMware ESXi virtual machine for NexentaStor. Actual OS installation is very easy and will be covered in another piece. Just over a year ago I created The Big WHS on a platform of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Windows Home Server installed in Hyper-V. Simply put, this may have been the easiest installation ever since Hyper-V and Windows Home Server work well together. With the lack of a new Drive Extender technology in Windows VAIL server, many users are looking to other storage platforms to fill the void. Read the full story

ZFSguru is a new FreeBSD based storage platform that was started by a FreeBSD and ZFS enthusiast to make an alternative to FreeNAS that tracks closer to a full-blown FreeBSD installation. Over the past few months, quite a few experimental builds have been offered for download and starting today, there is a final release of the 0.1.7 line. ZFSguru 0.1.7 is using ZFS version 15 and there are experimental builds with ZFS version 28 also available. Read the full story

This preview release has all the functionality of the first preview (0.1.7-preview), but in addition has the following changes:

The Mesa ZFS Web Interface/ ZFSguru benchmark has been recently updated since my last post on the Mesa ZFS Web Interface 0.1.7-Preview. Some of the highlight changes are support for the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 host bus adapter, a SMART monitoring interface, and an upgraded ZFS implementation. Again, this is not a “stable” release for production systems, but the ZFSguru benchmark is a good tool to burn-in hard drives due to the length of runs and the load put on drives. Here are the changes since the first preview release: Read the full story

I often get questions regarding good ways to stress test home servers, especially new drives. As part of the in-development FreeBSD 8.x based Mesa ZFS Web Interface, sub.mesa has released 0.1.7-preview of the interface with a built-in benchmark that runs for 12+ hours on many systems. Running this a few times on a new build is probably a good way to stress your storage and find any early failure drives.

This week, using the benchmark as a burn-in tool, I found one of a new batch of a dozen Western Digital Green 2TB drives that failed during the benchmark. Also, sub.mesa does development of the Mesa ZFS Web Interface in Sun/ Oracle VirtualBox so for those folks not able to commit a full system to the benchmark, this can be run in a virtual machine to test disks, RAID controllers and etc. Read the full story

On September 12, 2010 NetApp and Oracle agreed to dismiss an ongoing lawsuit over ZFS and WAFL. The original suit was filed by NetApp accusing then Sun Microsystems’ (which Oracle recently acquired) ZFS file system of infringing on NetApp’s patents.

Two intervening factors in the dismissal are likely that Sun was purchased by Oracle and on the other side of the equation NetApp recently announced that Matt Fawcett joined as the company’s new General Counsel and Secretary. Matt was instrumental in a lot of the JSDU/ JDS Uniphase litigation that the company won recently and has a lot of credibility for understanding big litigation.

This is a great announcement for those wishing to build a ZFS based FreeBSD or OpenSolaris system as it means one less threat to the longevity of ZFS. There is still a quite real possibility that Oracle will stop supporting ZFS but that is unlikely to happen in the near term due to support contracts for Sun hardware still being active.

Feel free to read NetApp’s announcement on this issue explaining that the suits have been dropped.

A quick browse of Anandtech.com shows a nice dissection of WHS Drive Extender v2.

The review goes into changes from Drive Extender v1, the way NTFS and the storage pool interact, 1GB file chunks distributed across hard drives in a Raid 0 fashion, 2 bit ECC, application compatability, and even a comparison with ZFS.

See the story at Anandtech.com here.