<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 31/10/2013 13:53, Chris Nehren wrote: </div> <blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_20131031135339_GG2186_eschaton_local" cite="mid:20131031135339.GG2186@eschaton.local" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 11:54:50 +0000, Ben Summers wrote: </pre> <blockquote class=" cite" id="Cite_8463855" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Hello, I'm speccing out some new hardware. It seems challenging to get vendor supported configurations which give you lots of discs on a Solarish OS, rather than using horrid RAID cards. The best config I've found so far seems to be a Fujitsu RX200 with 4 internal 15k SAS discs (the internal supported card can only do 8 drives if you use RAID), plus a Fujitsu branded LSI controller connected to an Intel 3.5" JBOD array for bulk storage and maybe an SSD for ZIL. Because I'd like to use all the internal discs for a database as a pair of mirrors in a single JBOD, I was wondering if anyone boots from USB discs? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">SmartOS is designed to run from USB drives. I don't know if their configuration supports mirroring, though. </pre> </blockquote> I guess that depends on how we interpret "mirroring". Mirrored boot disks make sense and are required in a traditional environment such as OmniOS. SmartOS just needs a method of getting the server up and running. SmartOS can be booted from a USB stick; CD ROM; or iPXE boot - effectively two fallback methods in addition to your primary boot method. ZFS has use of all the disks - internal or otherwise - for data storage. Depending on their size I'd recommend 3-way mirrors to ensure redundancy in the event of a disk failure and long resilver times. I'm not against OmniOS - we run it here and love it! The only negative I can see running SmartOS is the lack of IPS packaging - but it's a minor negative at that. -- Mark </body> </html>