RE: Simon Breden
"...Well, I didn't use components out of a skip, if that's what you mean. Dual-core 64-bit processors are cheap now and so is 4GB RAM -- did you take a look recently?..." Yes, I build systems for myself and friends as a hobby, and the typical requrst for a home NAS is "can you make it for a couple of hundred quid" rather than "hey, I have a grand to blow". I have also made NAS systems for small businesses and at work for corporates - neither was keen to waste money. If they wanted a "proper" solution, they were willing to pay for it, and Slowairs and ZFS soon dropped off the table
"....What are you talking about?...." Slowaris is slower than Linux to start with, but when you bring ZFS into the game it needs even more processing power to keep up. How do I know? Because we compared Slowaris with ZFS to RHEL on HP blades, both with local and EVA disks, and the result was we needed more memory and RAM in the Slowaris blades to get close to the RHEL performance. During the tests only one build suffered corruption, and it wasn't the RHEL one. After wading through dozens of patches on the Sun website, we then had a totally unexpected slow-down where we could see ZFS was thrashing the disks. The Sunshiners eventually got it all working, but it was still slower than the RHEL install on the same hardware (BL460c blades), and the RHEL was good from the word go. Guess which one got chosen for production.... No, guess again... I'll give you a clue - it was the OS not from Sun....
"....CPU cycles are abundant and cheap these days, unless we're running on your skip-retrieved Pentium II from the '90s. Mostly the CPU cycles are idle so why not use some? Also, that way, you avoid using proprietary RAID cards which must surely gain your favour as it involves spending less too...." So your answer is you need more CPU power, and more RAM, and just forget the impact on the real processing task in the background? Real smart - not! Because everyone of those "abundant and cheap" CPU cycles also means more RAM activity, more disk activity (lots of paging was our observation with ZFS, even with large memory space). Hardware RAID is better because it doesn't impact the main memory or CPU, cards such as the Adaptec ones are also cheap, and you can make use of a dozen other software packages to get the other largely unneccessary features offered by ZFS without having to slow your system down with Slowaris. Besides, why would a Mac user even want to get an extra box with another OS when he can just use a hardware RAID solution? Duh!
"....Irrelevant, as ZFS uses software RAID....." How is it irrelevant that the user has to go get a new OS they don't know, one that probably doesn't fit with any of the management tools they already have, and then have to patch to the eyeballs (remember those 4510 ZFS patches)? And software RAID eats into CPU cycles again, or do you think the Sun Ponytail fairy just sprinkles the system with magic dust and makes it RAIDed for nothing? Would you like to buy some real estate in the Everglades?
"....Now have you heard of the Sun Fire X4500 aka 'Thumper' ..." Excellent! You go from an over-priced and unsuitable hobby system to an extremely over-priced and just as unsuitable Sun solution! It's like shooting fish in a barrel! Thumper is a NAS and not a Fibre Channel RAID array like the Active Storage XRAID which can be direct-attached or XSAN-attached. And Thumper also forces you down the Slowaris route, which means extra work and management tools compared to the Active Storage XRAID system. Why on Earth do you think any Apple admin would want to introduce a Thumper when he can have the much more flexible XRAID and not have to worry about Slowairs (and it's never-ending patch farce)?
And face it, the XRAID solution has the ultimate fanboi appeal - a widget that allows them to manage it from an iBone. You could tell him the Sun box would get him laid twice-nightly by Brazillian supermodels and the fanboi would still go for the XRAID solution.
/Laugh, point, laugh, hold aching sides.