Anyone seen the new Sun FileSystem

[Brian Kelsay]

I stand by my original goofy take on the pie in the sky filesystem.  Maybe it works as stated, maybe not, but you cannot say that all these functions come at no cost.  Zero administration, disk pooling (RAID) and checksumming sounds great, but the hardware is still performing the calculations which come at a cost.  You may not notice the cost in CPU time or ram initially, but as you accumulate data any filesystem requires more resources.  The FAT or index of files grows.  This may need to be held in ram like other database tables and indexes are for speed of access.   Sun is banking on customers running this on Opteron or other 64-bit processors with large amounts of ram and fast i/o disks.  Sure they may be able to do those things as advertised, but to me it sounds like any other product that is the last word in widgets.

Don't bank on something like this running on older hardware such as a 1 GHz or even a single processor.  See above.  Is it really reasonable to assume that this filesystem is suitable for servers, SANs and desktops alike?

By the way, they did state in the article that we might someday outgrow this filesystems limits.  That is only reasonable.   Just look at the explosion of filetrading movies due to P2P and Broadband.  Now it is reasonable to have a 160GB or 200GB disk in a new PC.

Brian Kelsay

>>> Oren Beck <oren_beck at hotmail.com> 09/22/04 11:09AM >>>
> 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Oren Beck [
>>
>>hanasaki wrote:
>>
>>>http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/ 
>>>
>>>Any thoughts?