[NCSA-discuss] RAID recommendations?

[Breandan Dezendorf]

I concur with the Solaris + ZFS recommendation.  Keep in mind that ZFS
dedupe requires a lot of RAM, and when you run out, things go downhill
quickly.  Second, you cannot shrink a zpool, nor can you reduce the
number of disks (top-level VDEVs) in a zpool, nor can you switch from
mirror to stripe on the fly.  If you can live with those limitations,
ZFS is worth a look.  The snaphots, scrubing and compression are
amazing.

If you plan on doing NFS work, I strongly second the idea of getting
SSDs for log and cache devices.

Notes for RAM needs for dedupe:
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/dedup

-- 
Breandan Dezendorf
breandan at dezendorf.com