Recently I was given the task of putting together  a storage solution that would be used to  house a large amount of our digital assets.  I was also asked to make sure there would be enough space to meet our needs over the next few years.  The project called for a solution that could scale up to around 120TB of usable space.  Depending on the price, this solution might also be used to store a majority of our digital archive (audio and video).

I will go into the specific hardware and software details of the project in another post, however after about a month of research, we decided to go with a solution that was able to take advantage of the ZFS filesystem.

Here are a few documents that I found invaluable during my setup and overall planning:

ZFS Best Practices Guide

ZFS Configuration Guide

ZFS Troubleshooting Guide

ZFS Troubleshooting and Cheatsheet Guide

These links can be a starting point for anyone who wants to gain a better overall understanding of how to best administer a server running ZFS.  The ‘best practices guide’ is also a great resource to consult during the initial project planning stages.

I came across an interesting project last week while doing some research on OpenSolaris and zfs.  The distribution is called Nexenta.  The kernel of Nexenta is based on opensolaris, however the userspace tools are based on Debian/Ubuntu.

There is also a commercial offshoot called the Nexenta storage appliance which is a the Nexentra distribution packaged as a zfs based storage server.  Pricing is dependant on the maxium size of the storage pool.

I have downloaded the free version and am currently planning testing this distro with Gluster as well.  The FUSE project (which is required by a Gluster client to mount the filesystem) is currently not stable on opensolaris.  However I plan on using Nexenta as the server bricks of the Gluster cluster and using Linux as the client, since FUSE has no issues running on Linux.