Thursday, April 4, 2013

Linux/ZFS is great

A few days ago the ZFS on Linux people finally produced a production release of their latest code. I had been playing around a bit with it on an Ubuntu VM, but yesterday I installed it on a customer's  RedHat 6.2 production system. This system will be used to store PostgreSQL backups made with the barman package, and the feature we most wanted to use was the builtin file system compression - mainly to save on space requirements. Installing it and turning a SAN volume into a ZFS volume turned out to be incredibly easy and painfree. And it's a win-win situation. The IO time saved by using a compressed file system has reduced the time for a backup by about 60%, and the space saved in our case is about 80%. All in all I'm impressed, and I'm certainly going to be trying out some more of its features. It will be nice to ascertain what modes will be best suited to production database use.
at

7 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 4, 2013 at 12:43 PM

    I am just surprised that a customer was actually comfortable with deploying so new a technology into production! Good for them :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Andrew DunstanApril 4, 2013 at 12:55 PM

    It's really been production ready for a while, and lots of people have been using it. It's only been labeled as Release Candidate status out of an abundance of caution. And while ZFS might be somewhat new to Linux it's been around for a long time on Solaris and FBSD.

    Note too that this is a backup server. We're also deploying a hot standby for them and that will definitely NOT be on ZFS for now. But we're going to be testing ZFS for general database use somewhat aggressively, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  3. LycovianApril 4, 2013 at 1:30 PM

    We've been using ZFS for our backups for a few years on Solaris. It's de-dupe, compression, online snapshot and cloning features are a god send. We recently forklift upgraded a 1+TB database from PG 8.3.7 to 9.2.1 on different hardware with downtime of about 10 minutes which was only possible due to the ZFS incremental snapshot functionality. I can't imagine running PG on anything but ZFS currently. Glad to hear ZoL is now released as production ready. Our new servers will be CentOS based and I had been holding out for a ZoL (ZFS on Linux) marked stable.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alan WadeApril 5, 2013 at 6:51 AM

    It looks awesome and apart from main line distro soon I am going to test it.
    VPN Linux

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownSeptember 25, 2013 at 9:42 AM

    Would greatly appreciate your thoughts on this topic several months later. I've been researching this idea and ZFS looks like an excellent filesystem for Postgres. Are you still happy with it at this point?

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Andrew DunstanSeptember 25, 2013 at 11:07 AM

    Experience has been good but limited. So far I'm happy. Do check out Keith Paskett's slide deck from PostgresOpen at https://wiki.postgresql.org/images/c/c5/PostgresOnZFS-PGO.pdf. Unfortunately I missed his talk as it clashed with mine.

    ReplyDelete
  7. UnknownSeptember 25, 2013 at 1:59 PM

    Will do! Thanks very much, Andrew.

    ReplyDelete