Techie Stuff. Thumper x4500 and ZFS.
I just installed a Thumper, a Sun x4500 last week. Aside from the hours it took to install from a virtual CD using the iLOM interface, it took about 30 minutes to configure 32TB of usable storage in a RAID2Z configuration with 4 parity groups. In that thirty minutes I was also able to build a filesystem from the pool with 5TB reserved and exported for NFS use and compression enabled.
There are several blogs out there that I referred to when configuring this beast and that helped immensely in planning the deployment of this box. Next week, after my vacation, I plan on installing SAMBA/CIFS and seeing if I can make this 48k$ 48TB Raw ( thats 1$ a GB ) out perform the several NetApps that we use. I have trunked the 4 copper GB interfaces using dladm and LACP so we should be able to see some incredible performance out of this machine.
hey, what happened to SAMBA installation.. i am anxious..Did it work out for you..
Never got to it. I left XM before I could finish. I really liked the x4500 though. I probably wont have the same level of testing freedom I had at XM. I dont have data center access at Comcast. The NFS shares worked great though, we ended up running the archive DB on it and it performed very well, it also worked very good as a near line storage device for staging backups to disk before we sent them to tape.