The X4540 was brought to a standstill a few weeks ago by one dead SATA disk. The box didn't hang, but any ZFS IO did. Didn't lose any data, and it might be buggy hardware and drivers, but still, Sun support had no explanation. That should not happen.Eventually, we're going to give Symantec Netbackup the finger and move to Amanda, which will enable us to upgrade to OpenSolaris. I posted on Slashdot about this and got a reply from "greg1104":
"People need to understand that SATA disks and chipsets are fundamentally weak at error reporting and recovery. There's only so much you can do about that at the driver or OS level if a problem drives the chipset crazy. You really need hardware optimized for that purpose, like a mature and battle-tested RAID controller."
I agree 100%. For now, ZFS is worth the risk. The box is a virtual tape library, so 100% uptime is not a requirement. I'm not going to start shorting the stock of midrange storage companies just yet.
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