Brendan Gregg about L2ARC i...

Storage Analytics in the Sun Storage 7000 series is a great tool to monitor performance and to search for optimizations in your storage configuration (making your job easier). But this is only the customer side of the medal. There is a second one - albeit not so interesting for most people: It´s much easier to visualize the effects of certain developments in ZFS in presales and in blogs (making my job easier). Instead of showing boring numbers, you can show a nice chart to make you point clear. Brendans screenshots will definitely make it into my S7000 presentation (i don´t use the company ones as my presentation style is pretty much different to the official one)

Brendan used the possibilities of Storage Analytics to write a really great article about the L2ARC discussing the effects to performance (really fsking great), the price you have to pay for it (you have to warm the caches) and the impact on designing storage architecture with focus on performance (forget mirroring, hello wide striping - not for all workloads, but for many ... and you have to pay the price mentioned before). And obviously: It shows to you the strength of Storage Analytics to dig down into performance data. So ... i strongly suggest, that you read Brendans new article about L2ARC in his blog. It´s worth a read and as L2ARC is available for OpenSolaris as well you can transfer the informations to that operating environment as well.