hardware raid solutions?

[ubuntu at rio.vg]

Eric S. Johansson wrote:
> ubuntu at rio.vg wrote:
>> Is it just me, or does ZFS just sound too good to be true?
>>
> 
> yes, on one hand it does sound like a scam.  At the same time, many of 
> the things we have in our lives would sound like scams to people 20 
> years ago.  Hell, the fact that I am talking to the computer and it is 
> recognizing accurately 19 words of the 20 would sound like a scam even 
> 15 years ago.

But this is something that sounds like a scam today, and is supposed to
be available next month...

> as for all the code size, speed, etc. etc. claims, ZFS fits with what I 
> know is possible.  I've worked on filesystems and some of the things 
> they have solved were questions I was asking 10+ years ago.  Such as 
> what happens if you consider your disk storage a heap and start 
> aggregating physical disks under that heap.  I never quite got the 
> naming problem but it looks like they have come up with a good solution. 
>   The copy on right tricks make a lot of sense and are very simple to 
> implement.

Each individually are all straightforward.  I think it's more the fact
that it's all of them together.  It reads like a filesystem wish list.
It appears to promise everything at once, and that always sets off
warning bells in my mind.

> I will admit to a bit of sensitivity to random doubting claims coming 
> over mailing lists.  I've developed some anti-spam techniques[1] in the 
> past which got shot down, not because it wasn't any good but because the 
> people making comments were too lazy to do the math.  It wasn't until 
> much later that I built the model myself and showed had they were off by 
> at least a couple orders of magnitude on the effects of the system.

I'm not shooting it down, so much as being skeptical.  I certainly hope
it performs.  I'm not surprised your ideas about anti-spam were shot
down.  There have been so many bad suggestions for how to deal with
spam, I recall seeing a form letter with check-boxes created.

Also, the open source community, as a whole, tends to follow Linus
Torvald's maxim: "Show me the code."  Maybe it's that I've seen an awful
lot of blogging on ZFS, but not alot of code.

> so I ask you to be careful and measured in your doubt without 
> examination of the code or system.  Real or not real, without trying and 
> modeling, you can't tell.  If you have some facts, then it's OK to throw 
> stones.  :-)

Color me skeptical, then, rather than doubting.  It's like Wi-Max /
802.16.  It promises the world, but it's been several years and we've
yet to see a working device hit the market.

I certainly hope my skepticism is unfounded.  It all sounds very cool.