Another outstanding writeup from Don MacAskill on MySQL performance improvements, including some notes on using the new Sun Unified Storage Appliances (aka ‘Amber Road’). I’m glad Don is sharing his crib notes as I’ve been unable to work on my own tests of MySQL+ZFS due to time constraints.
This is a no-brainer folks. ZFS support of solid-state-drives (SSDs) for read & write caches mean that we’re going to see a massive revolution in the speed and quality of commodity open source-based storage systems. Already folks like Nexenta are building software only appliances. And OpenSolaris is available on EC2. ZFS + EC2’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) works like a charm.
Consider this: you could run all of your crucial data (including databases) on ZFS in your datacenter and then do block level (delta’s only) replication (a la NetApp’s SnapMirror feature) up to the cloud creating an instantly scalable and clean DR site in the sky.
For free.
There isn’t another solution for this right now. NetApp is hardware constrained and there isn’t a comparable software-only solution to ZFS in play right now.
I’ve talked briefly about ZFS in the cloud, MySQL, and related here, here, here, here, and here.
