Wiki or KB on Storage space?

[Diavuno]

heck why not wiki or KB on Storage?

We have the forums or sans/ZFS but its hard to sort when looking for a few particular answers.

Ive only seen one really good thread on storage spaces.

For me personally (clients included) the networking and prices of a $AN is a major hurdle, the general favorite - ZFS requires big memory. None of these solutions really seem to be great fits for the SMB.

I keep thinking 2012R2 with replication could be a great answer...

i have a few deployments with 2012, but its not how I'd like. generally using a RAID card and replicating out to a backup box.

but I'm thinking:
$700 per host for 2012 std.
clustering with HA
storage pools (simple/mirror/parity/parity2/tiering/rebuild to freespace
replication + dedupe
better drivers then class 1 hypervisors
and for that same 700$ you get 2 VM's???

whats not to like?

 

[DolphinsDan]

Bring back resources imho.

 

[Mike]

Don't you think 700 dollars is a hurdle itself for something simple as a filesystem? Most of the functionalities, and certainly the performance, can be had from free alternatives, not necessarily the cache-queen ZFS

 

[PigLover]

In fairness to ZFS, large RAM is ONLY required if you (a) enable Dedup - which would not be recommended for SMB/SOHO anyway - or (b) have a large number of simultaneous readers driving a need for large ARC to maintain performance.

Besides - if cost is your issue - you spend more than the memory cost overhead of ZFS on that $700/host license fee paid to Microsoft. And don't forget that to get decent performance from SS using any Parity spaces you are going to be investing in 2 or 3 extra SSDs per pool (compared to a single SSD for ZFS ZIL, if even needed).

I really like Storage Spaces for what it is, but can't really knock ZFS. There is no possible outcome where comparable performance systems cost less to build using Storage Spaces (because in all cases the underlying hardware costs about the same, clock for clock ZFS will perform better on comparable hardware because it is already more heavily optimized and then you have to pay the Microsoft tax). ZFS really is FAR superior to SS and the ONLY real reason to use SS is access to SMB2/multipath for network performance without requiring investment in 10Gbe.

 

[Chuntzu]

I would be on board for this, I love storage spaces. I am even trying my hand with clustered storage spaces and SAS drives. Got a great deal on a bunch of them.

 

[ehorn]

?..the ONLY real reason to use SS is access to SMB2/multipath for network performance without requiring investment in 10Gbe.

+1...

I remember getting excited for a moment when I saw freenas had an option for smb3...

Alas it is not multipath i/o...

 

[cesmith9999]

There are many SMB3 features other than SMB-Multi-Channel... however it is one of the coolest.

 

[Patrick]

Bring back resources imho.

This is one of three big forum enhancements I am working on.

 

[Diavuno]

Ya, the "microsoft tax" isn't great, but I'm primarily a Microsoft admin. A couple of full Std VM's is allowed per host for that 700!

While DeDupe isn't always recommended, it's a feature, available, and included for that flat fee.

SMB 3 with multipath is pretty awesome!

And ya, it requires multiple SSD's depending on your setup... For redundancy reasons I'm okay with that.