No more hiding in the server room

[Simple Talk SysAdmin Webinar] An Introduction to ZFS: Concepts and Practices

Event Details

Time: December 10, 2009 from 4pm to 5pm
Location: On-line
Website or Map: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/…
Event Type: webinar
Organized By: Michael Francis
Latest Activity: Dec 22, 2009

Export to Outlook or iCal (.ics)

Event Description

Presenter: Isaac Bush, Systems Administrator, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

This live 30-minute webinar will give an introduction to ZFS and discuss ZFS administrative, technical concepts and cover the actual techniques of managing ZFS. Key topics will be ZFS in contrast to the traditional filesystem\LVM combo, ZFS raid levels, ZFS and disk storage, and exporting ZFS volumes to other systems over iSCSI, NFS and CIFS.

Who should attend

System Administrators or other technical personnel who are interested learning about new filesystems and would like to learn about the benefits of ZFS in their infrastructure. Unix familiarity is assumed but not strictly necessary, ZFS is native to Solaris however Solaris experience is not assumed.

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/316983250

Comment Wall

Comment by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on October 19, 2009 at 7:55pm: I'm looking forward to this. I'm clueless about ZFS and hope for my eyes to be opened... or at least cracked a little bit. Being so far out in the future, the best I can do is "Might Attend".

Comment by Andrew Rogers on October 23, 2009 at 7:41pm: Same here, it's a bit far out to know what will be happening that day! I hope it'll be recorded and available for later viewing though?

Comment by Isaac on October 23, 2009 at 8:21pm: I’m not handling the technical aspect of the webinar so I can’t say if a recording will be posted but the others have so I’m sure it will.

I’ve been working this up and it looks like I have way more material then fits in 30 minutes so I’m trimming it down to cover all my topics in the allotted time. I’d like to ask is there any of these topics that you’d like to hear more about then the others?

For instance you (the general you) might be more interested in the details of how ZFS variable stripe width raidz actually works (topic 2) then in seeing Windows mount a ZFS based iSCSI LUN (topic 4). Or the reverse may be true.

It’s all the same to me so I’m happy to oblige the crowd.

Comment by Andrew Rogers on October 28, 2009 at 6:20pm: Nothing specific for me, but it all sounds like good material! Might you be willing to put the original full fat presentation/doc up after the meeting? :)

Comment by Isaac on November 4, 2009 at 8:57pm: Andrew Rodgers: “Nothing specific for me, but it all sounds like good material! Might you be willing to put the original full fat presentation/doc up after the meeting? :)”

Sure, happy to.

I’m thinking about trying my hand at a blog again so I may do an expanded version of this as a series of posts. Or maybe I’ll just do a screen cast of everything that could have gone in and post it somewhere.

Comment by Elizabeth Ayer on December 2, 2009 at 4:17pm: Hi -- sorry I missed the question when it first came in, but Michael will post a recording of this webinar afterwards. Of course, it's better to be there in person, if possible so that you can bombard Isaac with your questions!

Comment by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on December 9, 2009 at 3:47am: Just checking my calendar and realized this is coming up soon. I look forward to it with anticipation. Isaac, I missed your October 23rd post. If you've got more than 30 minutes, just schedule more webcasts if you're up for it. I'm game. However, as far as what details I'd like you to focus on... ummm... what does ZFS stand for? =)

Told ya' I was clueless.

Comment by Isaac on December 9, 2009 at 4:32am: Wesley "Nonapeptide": Just checking my calendar and realized this is coming up soon. I look forward to it with anticipation. Isaac, I missed your October 23rd post. If you've got more than 30 minutes, just schedule more webcasts if you're up for it. I'm game. However, as far as what details I'd like you to focus on... ummm... what does ZFS stand for? =)

Told ya' I was clueless.
Glad you're looking forward to it, hope you enjoy it. As for your name question; the short answer is it doesn’t mean anything.

Long answer: The lead developer stated that he wanted a name that would reflect the projects goals like “virtual object transactional storage system” but felt no one would take that seriously. So he decided the name would be a traditional acronym of some letter and FS and ZFS seemed cooler than some other letter FS. So in order to justify the ZFS acronym the Z was retrofitted to mean “zettabyte” taking into account that as a 128 bit file system ZFS can address enormous amounts of storage. But then the ZFS team found that whenever ZFS came up you had to explain what a zettabyte was and by the time you were done people thought the only point of ZFS was with large amounts of storage. So the ZFS team dropped the zettabyte meaning and now ZFS doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just a name.

Comment by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on December 9, 2009 at 4:35am: Cool, thanks for the explanation! I was wondering if it meant something like "Zero" as in the "Zero Downtime" z in the IBM zSeries mainframe. Or maybe it meant "Zoom" or "Zippy" or "Zounds!"

Comment by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on December 10, 2009 at 4:45pm: Great talk Isaac! I don't think I typed my question in time so I'll ask it here. I suspect that it's a bit daft, but ZFS seems to turn enough things that I've taken for granted on their head that I'm just a bit woozy with it all. =)

In your talk, in the initial slides, it seemed to me as if ZFS supplants a RAID controller. Is that accurate? If I was to get a shiny new Dell, would I get a big PERC card or would that introduce the block-level problems that you mentioned? It looked as if ZFS interfaces directly with the disks... which I know can't be true because all interactions with disks have to go through some form of a moderating bit of hardware.

For example, what kind of hardware set up were you showing the tests with snapshots and etc. on?

ZFS looks great. It's making this Windows admin want to start looking at Solaris training. That iSCSI demo at the end was really neat... could almost make a traditional SAN unnecessary for less disk intensive uses... right?