Bill Pijewski's Blog

Month: September 2012

Next Tuesday, October 2nd I’ll be talking at ZFS Day on how Joyent deploys its cloud services on top of ZFS.

One of the main design principles of ZFS is merging the management of physical volumes with individual filesystems. Instead of relying on an underlying volume manager, ZFS manages disks directly and aggregates them into pools from which individual filesystems are allocated. Storage servers using ZFS typically configure two pools: one pool onto which the system’s root filesystem is installed, and a second for the data to be managed by that system.

At Joyent we’ve taken a different approach and discarded the root pool in favor of a single system-wide pool. Not only does this approach free up an additional two drives to be used for main storage, it also provides us flexibility in upgrading system software, higher customer multitenancy, and ease of deploying new machines. In this talk, I’ll describe our overall architecture, talk about challenges we faced in constructing such an architecture, and characterize our experiences having deployed this model in production over the last 18 months.

The event is free to attend and will be streamed live. Hope to see you there!

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