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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 31/10/2013 13:53, Chris Nehren
wrote:<br>
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<pre wrap="">On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 11:54:50 +0000, Ben Summers wrote:
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<pre wrap="">Hello,
I'm speccing out some new hardware. It seems challenging to get vendor supported configurations which give you lots of discs on a Solarish OS, rather than using horrid RAID cards.
The best config I've found so far seems to be a Fujitsu RX200 with 4 internal 15k SAS discs (the internal supported card can only do 8 drives if you use RAID), plus a Fujitsu branded LSI controller connected to an Intel 3.5" JBOD array for bulk storage and maybe an SSD for ZIL.
Because I'd like to use all the internal discs for a database as a pair of mirrors in a single JBOD, I was wondering if anyone boots from USB discs?
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<pre wrap="">SmartOS is designed to run from USB drives. I don't know if their
configuration supports mirroring, though.
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<br>
I guess that depends on how we interpret "mirroring". Mirrored boot
disks make sense and are required in a traditional environment such
as OmniOS.<br>
<br>
SmartOS just needs a method of getting the server up and running.
SmartOS can be booted from a USB stick; CD ROM; or iPXE boot -
effectively two fallback methods in addition to your primary boot
method.<br>
<br>
ZFS has use of all the disks - internal or otherwise - for data
storage. Depending on their size I'd recommend 3-way mirrors to
ensure redundancy in the event of a disk failure and long resilver
times.<br>
<br>
I'm not against OmniOS - we run it here and love it! The only
negative I can see running SmartOS is the lack of IPS packaging -
but it's a minor negative at that.<br>
<br>
-- <br>
<br>
Mark<br>
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