Disk Spindown / Solaris Replication

[joisey04]

Hello,
after reading for months I'm getting close to build a diskless ESXi5 server and a ZFS SAN/NAS Storage Server Combination. Connection between the two should be Infiniband.

Two quick questions concerning the storage server:

- If I use 32GB DDR RAM for L1ARC and e.g. 320GB of L2ARC Cache, would the regular disks spin down if the requested data is held in the L1/L2 cache?

- zfs, as I understand, has a feature like rsync but instead of file based, it does a block based replication (send/receive??). It the replication extension for napp-it just a GUI or does it do more?
Differently asked: Is it possible to setup block based replication between two storage systems from solaris (or derivate) from the GUI / command line?

Thanks!!

 

[gea]

1. On Solaris (Solaris 11), spindows is currently not supported.
On OI, I have not tried if the disk will wake up on access when the data is in Cache

2. zfs send is a free feature of ZFS
The napp-it replication extension uses zfs send and allows to setup source/ target and a timetable for replications via GUI. It also uses a very fast transport mechanism and adds the needed remote control to start the send receive process together with monitoring for better error control.