About Solaris 11, AFS, ZFS, DTrace and a migration

Robert Milkowski gave recently a talk about OpenAFS on top on Solaris 11 at Morgan Stanley. Really interesting read. You can read it here. It writes about the advantages of Solaris 11 Robert writes in his own blog:

The main message of this part is, that if your data compresses well (above 2x), running OpenAFS on ZFS can deliver similar or even better performance but most importantly it can save you lots of $$, both in acquisition costs, and in cost of running AFS plant. In most cases you should even be able to re-use the current x86 hardware you have. The beauty of AFS is, that we were able to migrate data from Linux to Solaris/ZFS, in-place, by re-using the same x86 HW, and all of this was completely transparent to all clients (keep in mind we are talking about PBs of data) - this is truly the cloud file system. I think OpenAFS is one of the under-appreciated technologies in the market.

For the tech people even more interesting is the second part, because it is a nice example why DTrace is such a great thing, even when it’s hard to quantify the effect in a nice $ number.