CentOS - Oct 2011 - Netapp like snapshots using Centos 5/6 direct attached storage

Hello,

I'm researching the best method of providing about 20 users in a production
environment the same functionality as they would have on a Netapp NFS share.
The O/S I will be using is CentOS 5 or 6 (max flex on which one) and the
hardware is a disk array directly (12 SAS disks 7TB un-configured brand new)
attached to a HP 580 G 7.

I've done some reading on ZFS on Linux ,fuse-ZFS, BRTFS ,rsnapshot, snapFS. 

Any one have some advice or experiences to share?
  
Thanks,
spuds

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Scott McKenzie <spuds66 at hotmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm researching the best method of providing about 20 users in a
production environment the same functionality as they would have on a Netapp NFS
share.
> The O/S I will be using is CentOS 5 or 6 (max flex on which one) and the
hardware is a disk array directly (12 SAS disks 7TB un-configured brand new)
attached to a HP 580 G 7.
>
> I've done some reading on ZFS on Linux ,fuse-ZFS, BRTFS ,rsnapshot,
snapFS.
>
> Any one have some advice or experiences to share?
IMHO,
Currently none can beat ZFS features. If you look in wikipedia, only
ZFS has "YES" in all the columns.
I've tried fuse-zfs, not bad. The snapshot works great.
However performance is rather heavy.
ZFS on Linux is worth exploring.

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 09:56:52AM -0400, Scott McKenzie
wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I'm researching the best method of providing about 20 users in a
> production environment the same functionality as they would have on a
> Netapp NFS share.  The O/S I will be using is CentOS 5 or 6 (max flex
> on which one) and the hardware is a disk array directly (12 SAS disks
> 7TB un-configured brand new) attached to a HP 580 G 7.
> 
> I've done some reading on ZFS on Linux ,fuse-ZFS, BRTFS ,rsnapshot,
> snapFS. 
> 
> Any one have some advice or experiences to share?
>   
> Thanks,
> spuds 
ZFS will be the best, but FUSE ZFS is going to be slower and native ZFS
on Linux is still pretty young.

If you're tied to Linux and your users need absolute stability, I'd go
with tried and true LVM.  If they can be a little more tolerant to
churn / downtime / adventure, the other options you mentioned could
become doable.

If you're _not_ tied to Linux, take a look at Nexenta Community Edition
or Illumos / Solaris Express.

Not familiar with your array, but if it does hardware based snapshots,
might be an option as well.

Ray

Look into XFS+LVM.

For XFS, you'll have to yum it via;

yum install kmod-xfs xfs-progs xfs-dump

This is in the centosplus repo.

- aurf

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 6:56 AM, Scott McKenzie <spuds66 at hotmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm researching the best method of providing about 20 users in a
production
> environment the same functionality as they would have on a Netapp NFS
share.
> The O/S I will be using is CentOS 5 or 6 (max flex on which one) and the
> hardware is a disk array directly (12 SAS disks 7TB un-configured brand
new)
> attached to a HP 580 G 7.
>
> I've done some reading on ZFS on Linux ,fuse-ZFS, BRTFS ,rsnapshot,
snapFS.
>
> Any one have some advice or experiences to share?
>
> Thanks,
> spuds
>
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