In 2008, the ZFS Storage Appliance (nee the Sun Storage 7000) was one of the first architectures to add flash SSDs between the existing tiers of disk and memory. The Hybrid Storage Pool (HSP) offered completely new economies, but with both known and unknown idiosyncrasies. Adam Leventhal, the inventor of the HSP, will talk about their functionality and utility, pitfalls and shortcomings, as well as the next steps for ZFS amidst an ever changing landscape of technologies and economics.
The ZFS hybrid storage pool model is very flexible and allows many different combinations of storage technology to be used. This presents a dilemma to the systems architect: what is the best way to build and configure a pool to meet business requirements? We’ll discuss modeling ZFS systems and hybrid storage pools at a datacenter scale. The models consider space, performance, dependability, and cost of the storage devices and any interconnecting networks (including SANs). We will also discuss methods for measuring the performance of the system.
