freebsd stable - Sep 2010 - Extending your zfs pool with multiple devices

I have a small problem that I am trying to work out a solution for. 
Imagine you create a NAS box. Fill a small server with 5 hard drives, 
zfs them with raidz or whatever, create your pools and then shear this 
to the network using samba. Simple NAS box for your network to put their 
files and they just connenct to \\nas1

This box is now full, my problem is that I could create a 2nd NAS box 
and people use \\nas1 and \\nas2 but it's not very use friendly. Can I 
somehow build a 2nd box which is identicle, but extend my pools into 
nas2. I was thinking something like exporting the nas2 drives via iscsi 
and then nas1 add's the drives to the pool...or something similar. I 
find that with any NAS whether its home build or shop bought you will 
eventually run out of space, and sure you can replace the HDD's with 
bigger ones but you will see run out of space, and having multiple 
locations, in my mind, is not very elegant. I cannot simply add more 
HDD's to the box as well as it's at full capacity

Thanks

You need an HP SAS expander card in the new box, and an HBA in your primary
box with external ports to hook it into.

Then the drives in the other box will show up as local drives on your
primary box.

You don't even need an operating system on the second box, it just needs
enough hardware in it to supply power to the SAS expander.

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Michal <michal@sharescope.co.uk> wrote:
> I have a small problem that I am trying to work out a solution for. Imagine
> you create a NAS box. Fill a small server with 5 hard drives, zfs them with
> raidz or whatever, create your pools and then shear this to the network
> using samba. Simple NAS box for your network to put their files and they
> just connenct to \\nas1
>
> This box is now full, my problem is that I could create a 2nd NAS box and
> people use \\nas1 and \\nas2 but it's not very use friendly. Can I
somehow
> build a 2nd box which is identicle, but extend my pools into nas2. I was
> thinking something like exporting the nas2 drives via iscsi and then nas1
> add's the drives to the pool...or something similar. I find that with
any
> NAS whether its home build or shop bought you will eventually run out of
> space, and sure you can replace the HDD's with bigger ones but you will
see
> run out of space, and having multiple locations, in my mind, is not very
> elegant. I cannot simply add more HDD's to the box as well as it's
at full
> capacity
>
> Thanks
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
"freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
>


-- 
Joshua Boyd
JBipNet

E-mail: boydjd@jbip.net

http://www.jbip.net