On 16 April 2012 20:12, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote: <...>
ZFS seems to be a lot more complex than BTRFS. While having more features is a good thing (BTRFS seems to be missing some sysadmin friendly features) complexity means more testing and more potential for making mistakes.
Of course it might turn out that RAID-5 is the killer issue. Servers start becoming a lot more expensive if you want more than 8 disks and even 6 disks is a significant price point. An 8 disk RAID-5 gives something like 21TB usable space vs 12TB on a RAID-10 and a 6 disk RAID-5 gives about 15TB vs 9TB on a RAID-10.
Anything else I should consider?
Depending on your client's budget, you might also want to consider a refurbished Sun X4500 (Thumper) with 24/48TB of storage. With ZFS, use could two disks for your root pool, and the remaining 46 for 4x raidz2 pools, which would give the best compromise for redundancy and performance. Running Solaris would give you the added benefit that it "just works", with boot/root on ZFS, and integrated NFS and iSCSI. -- Joel Shea <jwshea@gmail.com>