zfs discuss - Sep 2007 - ZFS storage appliance?

I''ve been doing a lot of reading about ZFS lately, and I''m
quite enamored of its design goals. The reliability considerations are
particularly attractive, and the snapshot scheme is more robust than anything
I''m familiar with. I would very much like to keep my personal data in
such a filesystem.

Some time ago, I caught the launch of Drobo, a USB-connected box that does some
RAID-like things with drives, but without any of the RAID management headaches.
It transparently grows and shrinks as devices come and go, and just presents a
big LUN to the host. Essentially it''s a storage appliance, and while it
helps if you format it with a supported filesystem, it''s
OS-independent.

In a similar vein, I''m looking for a ZFS appliance, either software (a
VMware image?) or hardware, to confer the benefits of ZFS upon whatever machine
I stick it to. It should simply share the resulting filesystem(s) over Samba or
NFS (or iSCSI?), and give me a shell I can ssh into for taking snapshots,
creating filesystems, and such.

Doing it in a VM would abstract the hardware, eliminating compatibility concerns
with JBOD controllers and such. Performance is my *last* concern, so
I''m not worried about that aspect, though making the host OS do
S.M.A.R.T. monitoring breaks the "appliance"-ness of the idea.
Nevertheless, this is the direction I''m leaning.

If someone makes a (very quiet!) little ZFS box with a prebuilt OS image on a CF
card and a couple slots for bring-your-own-drive pool growing goodness, please
clue me in, as I wasn''t able to find it with Google.

I''m not opposed to building such a thing myself, but the last time I
felt friendly with a command-line, it was DOS 6. I don''t know whether
to start with Solaris Express Community or Developer, or NexentaOS, the FreeBSD
port, or something else entirely.

Am I crazy for attempting this?
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

That doesn''t exist yet because everything about OpenSolaris is pretty
young.  The demand is there though because there is a constant stream of people
interested in ZFS as a home file archive system.

By the time Indiana is off its feet, popularity will grow, the distro
constructor will exist, and I have no doubt that a FreeNAS/Openfiler type distro
will pop up.  I saw on the Nexenta forum that someone wanted to do it already
with NexentaCP (because NexentaCP is smaller and appears simpler than SXCE), but
because NexentaCP isn''t very actively developed, that was apparently a
dead end.

Right now the best you can do is built a small computer with SXCE, or use SXCE
in a virtual machine.  And even then it takes a lot of software wrangling to get
SXCE set up as a file server.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org