[BackupPC-users] ZFS/Nexenta Ready

Just an FYI for those interested. Nexenta Core 2 (based on ubuntu 8.04) is out and runs backuppc great.

The only issue was that ping is not in /bin/ping, its in /usr/sbin/ping so you have to create a link.

Also, exim is what wants to be installed and it is not very functional, just install postfix to clear that up.

Here is a little rundown of why to try nexenta and zfs for backuppc

The ONLY distribution that has backuppc available in the repos (bpc3.0)

opensolaris kernel which gives you a very very fast network stack, faster than linux.

ZFS
1)gives you on-filesystem compression. I know that backuppc provides this but you can turn off compression in backuppc and use the in-filesystem backup for better write performance. I get slightly better compression ratios with ZFS' default compression (lzo) and slightly better backup times, about 4 or 5% on each.
2) I/O buffers. This essentially caches I/O and re-orders it for more sequential writes. The benefit here is that it makes your disk seem like it has much better I/O performance especially with heavy I/O loads like backuppc puts on the system.
3)free snapshots. you can shut down backuppc, take an instant snapshot, and start it back up and you will have a point in time snapshot that you can sync against another machine or pull off to external media for storage.
4)block level tranport. You can transport a ZFS volume from one server to another over TCP/IP. This is nice if you want to replicate your ZFS backuppc store to another machine because you can take a snapshot, send it over to a new machine, and promote that snapshot. They you can do incremental snapshots in the future and send them over, only transfering the blocks that changed. requires some fance scripting but is very doable.
5)SSD for backuppc. Solid state disks just dont have the capacity to be primary backup solutions but they do have the I/O performance that we want. With ZFS you can put a SSD in as a cache disk and take advantage of the fast I/O and it will dump sequential writes to your spindled drives. This can help a lot. I have only been able to test it with a slower OCZ SSD but I clocked a 5% improvement in backup times that was repeatable. I think a faster SSD could really make a big difference.

The down side is that you might have some learning curve with the opensolaris kernel, but the environment is very much ubuntu. Also, ZFS is a memory hog. You really need to have 2GB+ RAM. You can pretty much get by with that as ZFS can control itself with 2GB but if you only have 1GB then the filesystem will eat up all of it and your system will not behave itself. You might also have some driver issues if you have 1-off hardware or an old system as opensolaris does not have the extensive hardware support of a linux system.

There are tons of other benefits but none that I can think are relevant to backuppc.

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