The iSCSI mounts would be for system disks only; you don't need to share them on multiple machines they are tied to the machine. As it runs RAID-Z, the sequential speeds are very high, all writes are buffered anyway so fast too. Reads are normally slow, but in my case i have a RAID0 of two SSDs as cache device, most accessed parts will have the read-latencies associated with the SSD instead.
For my shared access, i use NFS which is faster than Samba (SMB/CIFS) but better, much faster anyway. In this case ZFS stores the files, just like when using Samba (SMB/CIFS).
For the zvol-exported iSCSI filesystems, you can apply snapshots just like on normal zfs filesystems. I think it's great and very flexible. Though i would like an upgrade to 10GBaseT once it comes available, giving me 10 Gigabit throughput; or like 600MB/s in practise. Then i would really reap the rewards as both my system drive and central storage will have SSD-like performance, even though most is stored on the HDDs.
It would have the read access times of the SSD if it were cached; large files are not cached but are accessed sequentially. Sequential I/O would be over 600MB/s, writes are little over 400MB/s, random writes are buffered and generally high-performance, even though on HDDs. Thanks to ZFS's advanced caching and buffering, i might add. That RAM usage is good for something.
For my shared access, i use NFS which is faster than Samba (SMB/CIFS) but better, much faster anyway. In this case ZFS stores the files, just like when using Samba (SMB/CIFS).
For the zvol-exported iSCSI filesystems, you can apply snapshots just like on normal zfs filesystems. I think it's great and very flexible. Though i would like an upgrade to 10GBaseT once it comes available, giving me 10 Gigabit throughput; or like 600MB/s in practise. Then i would really reap the rewards as both my system drive and central storage will have SSD-like performance, even though most is stored on the HDDs.
It would have the read access times of the SSD if it were cached; large files are not cached but are accessed sequentially. Sequential I/O would be over 600MB/s, writes are little over 400MB/s, random writes are buffered and generally high-performance, even though on HDDs. Thanks to ZFS's advanced caching and buffering, i might add. That RAM usage is good for something.