[geeks] Pure ZFS machine - possible?

[velociraptor]

On 11/9/06, Mike Meredith <very at zonky.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Nov 2006 15:34:27 -0700 (MST), Dan Duncan wrote:
> > I goofed with ZFS a bit to try it out.  I liked it and it was pretty
> > easy to manage but I was initially told it offered scalable raid5
> > like storage and as far as I can tell it doesn't.  If I create a
> > raidZ container of say 5 disks and then later expand it by one, it
> > just concatenates the filesystem across the 5-disk raidZ and the
>
> It's probably a very difficult problem to enlarge a raid5 (or raidz)
> vdev non-destructively. The only storage vendor I know of that offers
> anything like that is NetApp and they use RAID4 to allow this.

I believe the Infrant ReadyNAS will go from a 3 disk RAID 5 to a 4
disk RAID 5 non-destructively, so it is possible without shelling out
for NetApp (not that I discourage doing so :-).  I thought it was
possible in Solaris VM and VxVM as well, but could be mis-remembering.
 I haven't touched software RAID 5 in a long while.

=Nadine=