Cloud Storage With ZFS

rsync.net supports ZFS send and receive over SSH

If you're not sure what this means, our product is Not For You.

A Natural Evolution

In 2012 rsync.net transitioned to ZFS as the base of it's cloud storage platform.[1]

In addition to enhanced data safety and resiliency[2], ZFS allowed us to offer snapshots of user accounts on any schedule.

The obvious next step was to offer ZFS send and receive, over SSH, to our platform.
[1] We run ZFS on FreeBSD
[2] Our conservatively sized raidz3 arrays have a 99.9999% resiliency.

We are the only cloud storage provider offering native zfs send and receive. A Special "zfs send Capable" Account is Required

Every account at rsync.net runs on our ZFS platform - but zfs send/recv requires special settings.

There is no difference in price - cost per Gigabyte/Month is the same - but there is a 1TB minimum.

You will control your own zpool and manage your own snapshots.

You will receive technical support from UNIX engineers for your use of zfs send and receive.

We look at the amazing features in ZFS and btrfs—and why you need them.

The MP3 that startled you with a violent CHIRP!, and you wondered if it had always done that? No, it probably hadn't—blame bitrot. The video with a bright green block in one corner followed by several seconds of weird rainbowy blocky stuff before it cleared up again? Bitrot.

The worst thing is that backups won't save you from bitrot. The next backup will cheerfully back up the corrupted data, replacing your last good backup with the bad one. Before long, you'll have rotated through all of your backups (if you even have multiple backups), and the uncorrupted original is now gone for good.

Contrary to popular belief, conventional RAID won't help with bitrot, either. "But my raid5 array has parity and can reconstruct the missing data!" you might say. That only works if a drive completely and cleanly fails. If the drive instead starts spewing corrupted data, the array may or may not notice the corruption (most arrays don't check parity by default on every read). Even if it does notice... all the array knows is that something in the stripe is bad; it has no way of knowing which drive returned bad data—and therefore which one to rebuild from parity (or whether the parity block itself was corrupt).

What might save your data, however, is a "next-gen" filesystem.
As a test, I set up a virtual machine with six drives. One has the operating system on it, two are configured as a simple btrfs-raid1 mirror, and the remaining three are set up as a conventional raid5. I saved Finn's picture on both the btrfs-raid1 mirror and the conventional raid5 array, and then I took the whole system offline and flipped a single bit—yes, just a single bit from 0 to 1—in the JPG file saved on each array. Here's the result:The raid5 array didn't notice or didn't care about the flipped bit in Finn's picture any more than a standard single disk would. The next-gen btrfs-raid1 system, however, immediately caught and corrected the problem. The results are pretty obvious. If you care about your data, you want a next-gen filesystem. Here, we'll examine two: the older ZFS and the more recent btrfs.

if you accept my definition, "next-generation" currently means "fifth generation." It's defined by an entire set of features: built-in volume management, per-block checksumming, self-healing redundant arrays, atomic COW snapshots, asynchronous replication, and far-future scalability.

FreeBSD utility to manage, backup, and restore Boot Environments on ZFS filesystems from an easy to use Text User Interface(TUI), bemanager is actually a wrapper around the well known FreeBSD beadm utility.

The utility also uses the default zfs send/receive commands for BE/Snap backup and restoration to/from either local or remote storage with XZ compression but is not limited to.

Please note that this utility is not intended to be a replacement for the command line, but rather for the ease of some common task on demand.

XigmaNAS Full RootOnZFS features and abilities:

• Can be installed on one or more drives.
  • Firmware Upgrades from the WebGUI with .TGZ official files available at SF.
• Can be installed on virtually all ZFS raid levels for desired redundancy.
• Support for UEFI capable hardware and virtualized environments.
• Support for Boot Environments at OS level and from boot loader time for convenience.
• Support for System OS compression, Installation almost halved in space to save SSD space.
• Previous Boot Environment will be left intact after Firmware upgrades.
• User ability to rollback to a previous working Boot Environment from OS or at boot time at any time.
• User can make new Boot Environments and reboot into it to make system wide changes for convenience.
• User can delete, rename, clone, mount etc etc. Boot Environments.
• User can add, edit, modify to XigmaNAS Full with peace of mind thanks to Boot Environments/Snapshots.

zfs destroy -rv dataset_or_vol_name@%

test first:

   zfs destroy -rnv dataset_or_vol_name@%

will also indicate how much data will be freed

XigmaNAS is an embedded Open Source NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on the latest FreeBSD 11-2 Releases.

It supports sharing across multiple operating systems, including Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. XigmaNAS is easy to set up in most home and enterprise environments and will allow you to manage and share large amounts of data easily across your network. XigmaNAS also incorporates many different streaming features for sharing your multimedia with other devices on your network.

XigmaNAS includes ZFS v5000 (Feature Flags) (RAID-Z, RAIDZ-2 & RAIDZ-3) Software RAID (0,1,5), JBOD, Disk Encryption, S.M.A.R.T. / Email Reports, includes the following protocols: CIFS/SMB (Samba), Active Directory Domain Controller (Samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI (initiator and target), HAST, CARP, Bridge, UPnP, and Bittorent, which are all highly configurable by using XigmaNAS's great web user interface.

XigmaNAS (formerly Nas4Free) is a great free solution for a NAS box, trouble is that without proper configuration it will not properly work with Active Directory consistently and can have issues with inheritance of permissions. These are the steps we take at RMTT to get them stable in an Active Directory environment. ///

Build hardware RAID Array (hardware RAID still faster than software RAID of XigmaNAS)

-- Hardware RAID might be marginally faster than software RAID, but completely negates all the benefits of using ZFS, including portability of drives to new server without needing a proprietary hardware controller...

from Allan Jude and Michael W Lucas

ZFS improves everything about systems administration. Once you peek under the hood, though, ZFS’ bewildering array of knobs and tunables can overwhelm anyone. ZFS experts can make their servers zing—and now you can, too, with

the first of two ZFS books, by critically acclaimed author Michael W Lucas and FreeBSD developer Allan Jude

ZFS, the fast, flexible, self-healing filesystem, revolutionized data storage. Leveraging ZFS changes everything about managing FreeBSD systems.

Attic and borg are "deduplicating backup program(s)" that can create and maintain remote backups over SSH.

Over the course of 2014 and 2015, attic and borg have become the de facto standard for efficient, secure, remote backups.

They both provide:

• source data encrypted on the source with no keys or access given to the remote receiver
• fast, bandwidth efficient and deduplicating
• fully open source
• active, current development

In short: attic and borg are the rsync tools of the cloud generation

We built our own cloud platform - we are not reselling another cloud like Amazon or Google.

We give you a real, live UNIX filesystem running on our 99.9999% resilient ZFS platform.

You may access the account with any tool that runs over SSH. Tools like attic and borg.

We have a world class network with locations in three US cities as well as Zurich and Hong Kong.

Special "attic accounts" are available at a very deep discount for technically proficient UNIX engineers.

• filesystem snapshots are disabled since you'll be doing versioning and retention with attic or borg.

There is NO attic/borg specific technical support or integration engineering. You're here because you're an expert.

    2 cents per GB/month - 40 GB minimum, paid annually - Click here for that rate and plan

    No other costs. No contracts. All transfer/bandwidth/usage is free.

As of the Summer of 2012, the rsync.net storage platform is based on ZFS. We utilize raidz-3 (a raid array that can withstand 3 failed disks, as opposed to raid-6 that can withstand only 2 failed disks) with conservatively sized (12 disk) vdevs. We also create zpools with 4 or fewer vdevs.

Our ZFS platform uses the very best practices (IT, or "disk only" firmware on our host bus adaptors and only ECC RAM) as well as very conservative (overkill, really) disk replacement and scrub schedules.

All power is conditioned and backed by battery banks which are backed by diesel generators. Physical machines are connected to at least two distinct power circuits.