[Beowulf] Big storage

[Steffen Grunewald]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 07:58:45AM +0100, John Hearns wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 01:01 -0500, Bruce Allen wrote:
> 
> > Since stock Solaris can not boot from ZFS, I'm a bit reluctant to throw 
> > away drives and storage space to host the OS separately on each X4500. 
> 
> I went to a talk on ZFS recently (very impressive).
> AFAIK Opensolaris will boot from ZFS, but you know that anyway as you
> make a clear distinction in what you have said in that sentence.

I have talked to one of the Solaris guys yesterday, and was told that Solaris 10
Upgrade 5 (10U5 in short) will be out within the next two weeks or so.
While their upcoming "Project Indiana" will install on, and boot from,
ZFS (there will be a "Live CD" as well) it's not yet clear which features
that have been integrated into, and tested with, OpenSolaris/"Nevada" --
I couldn't even get information about the ZFS version 10U5 will provide.

Of course there's always the option to run Solaris Express (Community
Edition releases come out every 2 weeks, and may be feature-rich and buggy;
Developer Editions are released every quarter, 1/08 is Nevada build 79 with
two additional rounds of fixes, thus referred to as 79b) but in this case
you'll be on your own. No security fixes, no support - you have to upgrade 
to newer versions frequently. I don't know whether you'd like to reinstall
your file servers once or twice a month :-/

It has been made clear that not all features in OpenSolaris will make it
into the "commercial" products at all. This may mean that while the recent
ZFS manual refers to clever features in Nevada build xy, you'll never get them.

Steffen