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=== ZFS RAID levels ===

When we evaluated ZFS for our storage needs, the immediate question became – what are these storage levels, and what do they do for us? ZFS uses odd (to someone familiar with hardware RAID) terminology like Vdevs, Zpools, RAIDZ, and so forth. These are simply Sun’s words for a form of RAID that is pretty familiar to most people that have used hardware RAID systems.

  * Striped Vdev’s (RAID0)
Striped Vdev’s is equivilent to RAID0. While ZFS does provide checksumming to prevent silent data corruption, there is no parity nor a mirror to rebuild your data from in the event of a physical disk failure. This configuration is not recommended due to the potential catastrophic loss of data that you would experience if you lost even a single drive from a striped array.  How To Create Striped Vdev Zpool

  * Mirrored Vdev’s (RAID1)
This is akin to RAID1. If you mirror a pair of Vdev’s (each Vdev is usually a single hard drive) it is just like RAID1, except you get the added bonus of automatic checksumming. This prevents silent data corruption that is usually undetectable by most hardware RAID cards. Another bonus of mirrored Vdev’s in ZFS is that you can use multiple mirrors. If we wanted to mirror all 20 drives on our ZFS system, we could. We would waste an inordinate amount of space, but we could sustain 19 drive failures with no loss of data.  How To Create Mirrored Vdev Zpool

  * Striped Mirrored Vdev’s (RAID10)
This is very similar to RAID10. You create a bunch of mirrored pairs, and then stripe data across those mirrors. Again, you get the added bonus of checksumming to prevent silent data corruption. This is the best performing RAID level for small random reads.  How To Create Striped Mirrored Vdev Zpool

  * RAIDZ (RAID5)
RAIDZ is very popular among many users because it gives you the best tradeoff of hardware failure protection vs useable storage. It is very similar to RAID5, but without the write-hole penalty that RAID5 encounters. The drawback is that when reading the checksum data, you are limited to basically the speed of one drive since the checksum data is spread across all drives in the zvol. This causes slowdowns when doing random reads of small chunks of data. It is very popular for storage archives where the data is written once and accessed infrequently.  How To Create RAIDZ Zpool

  * RAIDZ2 (RAID6)
RAIDZ2 is like RAID6. You get double parity to tolerate multiple disk failures. The performance is very similar to RAIDZ.  How To Create RAIDZ2 Zpool

  * RAIDZ3
This is like RAIDZ and RAIDZ2, but with a third parity point. This allows you to tolerate 3 disk failures before losing data. Again, performance is very similar to RAIDZ and RAIDZ2.

  * Nested RAID levels – You can also add striped RAIDZ volumes to a storage pool. This would be akin to RAID50 or RAID60. This would increase performance over RAIDZ while reducing capacity of your physical storage.  How to create Striped RAIDZ Zpool

=== ZFS Storage profile ===
  * Data profile {{:storage:zfs_storage_data_profile.png?200|}}
  * Log profile  {{:storage:zfs_storage_log_profile.png?200|}}

=== Default Storage username/password ===
  * EMC: admin/admin
  * Sun: root/changeme
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