Abstract
ZFS is a powerful storage management technology combining filesystem, volume management and software RAID technology into a single solution. The WLCG Tier-2 computing at Edinburgh was an early adopter of ZFS on Linux, with this technology being used to manage all of our storage systems including servers with aging components. Our experiences of ZFS deployment have been shared with the Grid storage community which has led to additional sites adopting this technology. ZFS is highly configurable therefore allowing systems to be tuned to give best performance under diverse workloads. This paper highlights our experiences in tuning our systems for best performance when combining ZFS with DPM storage management. This has resulted in reduced system load and better data throughput. This configuration also provides the high redundancy required for managing older storage servers. We also demonstrate how ZFS can be combined with Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) technology to provide a performant and resilient hypervisor solution to host multiple production Grid services.
Highlights
In order to meet the requirements of running a WLCG Tier-2, resources hosted by a university have to provide a high level of reliability
ZFS has proven itself to be a highly flexible and configurable storage technology which can be used for a variety of different workloads
This technology has proven itself to be reliable for maintaining storage at the Edinburgh Tier-2 and is capable of avoiding data loss due to hardware failures
Summary
In order to meet the requirements of running a WLCG Tier-2, resources hosted by a university have to provide a high level of reliability. To most efficiently provide this with the minimum amount of manpower it is best to build automation, failover and reliability into the sites infrastructure. With this in mind Edinburgh has chosen to make use of ZFS[1] as a backing storage technology. Building on previous work[2] at Edinburgh, ZFS has been used as the main storage management solution at the Tier-2. This is used to manage the various storage servers at the site to manage aging and newer storage technologies. As well as being a purely storage management solution, we have combined ZFS with DRBD to provide a network redundant storage system to store Virtual Machine(VM) images which host Tier-2 services
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