How does one go about running intensive business-intelligence (BI) database queries on rapidly changing data? We found ourselves pondering this question while helping Etsy do periodic reporting on their massive BI database. We harnessed the power of ZFS to create lightweight, yet writable, clones of production data that could be deleted when the report was done. The side effect was that we could also stand up staging environments at any time to test upgrades, schema changes and anything else that needed to be validated against real data.
A panel at ZFS Day covering the state of ZFS on Linux, FreeBSD, illumos, and more, moderated by Deirdré Straughan wih Matt Ahrens, Justin Gibbs, Will Andrews, Don Brady, Brian Behlendorf
Many of the features in Illumos are already being exploited in the Enterprise and Cloud settings. Features like ZFS (for flexible, robust storage), Zones (for both lightweight hosts and even full Virtual Machine containment), and Crossbow (network traffic shaping and bandwidth management) can easily be spotted in the wild today.
A combination of all of the above features can be exploited in a home or small-business setting to great effect on a single physical machine. This talk will present a home and a small-business deployment of Illumos which eliminates multiple boxes, and uses rock-solid illumos technology.
