Small footprint ... what's the buzz?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Now can we switch back to things that are even remotely connected to ZFS?

 

[jgreco]

My source of amazement was that you posted a link to a server ad from about 15 years ago...

I don't recall doing any such thing.

"RAID has been on its way out for a long time" - I don't know about you, but when I have a house guest and they are "on their way out" ...

[much wordiness snipped]

Mike

I think the concept you're missing is "long tail". There are still mainframes around, but they've been on their way out for a long time too. It's just a matter of where on the curve these technologies are. It's generally recognized in the industry that things are moving away from the big monolithic Windows Servers that were dominant for a decade or maybe two, and the underlying immaturity that made hardware RAID controllers a way to fix shortcomings upstairs. We've watched RAID be replaced with software solutions, generally quite a bit more flexible than RAID, layer 2 and layer 3 switching and routing being replaced with SDN and abstractions. Conventional storage vendors such as EMC are not scaling at the rate that the growth of global computing is. With the transition away from flaky HDD and towards flash, a lot of new installs are simply skipping the RAID controller, and relying instead on what's called "infrastructure as code" tools such as Terraform to define how their systems should look, and they will simply rebuild stuff "from source" in the unlikely event of a failure. It's happening. It doesn't mean that everybody stopped using RAID controllers, it just means that they're not as much of a core component as they once were.

 

[Samuel Tai]

@EasyGoing1, enough digressions. You asked for suggestions on small footprint NAS systems. We've provided links, and you've diverted the discussion into historical minutiae unrelated to your original question. We're happy to help you design such a system, provided you divulge your design goals. As it is, I'm going to close this thread for further replies.