Re: Sun ZFS vs. Oracle ASM

From: Vikas Agnihotri <usenet_at_vikas.mailshell.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:45:09 -0500
Message-ID: <35b4u7F4iegriU1@individual.net>

Niall Litchfield wrote:
> I didn't see that from the article, it looked to me like they are
> guaranteeing the integrity of disk operations with recoverability via
> snapshots.

By transactional I meant similar to the journaling filessytems out there. Basically, pull the power cord on a running server and filesystem integrity is not comprised, no fsck needed.

>>ZFS, Oracle 10g ASM, Veritas suite of products, sheesh...so many options 
>>to do essentially the same thing!

>
> They don't do quite the same thing. ZFS provides easily managed large and
> easily extensible filesystems over a pool of storage. ASM provides striping
> mirroring and data redundancy as well as eliminating datafile management
> whilst veritas provides volume management. All in the same area yes, not
> necessarily the same features

Veritas looks like it has the least value add in all this. ZFS's storage pool can carve out volumes on-the-fly and expand/shrink as needed. Good bye, Veritas?!

Cant ZFS be configured to do data redundancy and striping i.e. RAID type features? Surely it can? Why would Sun design a new filesystem in 2004 from scratch and leave out these features? What if a single drive in a 20-drive ZFS storage pool dies? All the filesystems based on the pool are unusable? Surely not

Thanks Received on Thu Jan 20 2005 - 19:45:09 CST