I have a pair of physical servers with 32TB of raw disk space each (4 * 8TB x 2) in a ZFS pool on Ubuntu. After formatting, I am currently at 86% used and my data volume is growing at a reasonably constant 50G per week. I've recently setup the ZFS volume on the 4 disks from just 4 separate volumes (synced to the other server for some redundancy) so I don't have to manage 4 volumes (x 2 servers) and do less balancing of each volume as it's now just 1 large volume.
I'm soon going to need to add another disk to the volume (technically 2, one per server), but I already know that you just can't dynamically add a disk to an existing ZFS volume set to increase it's overall size, you just end up with a "safer" old volume (with parity) and a completely "unsafe" new volume.
My question is: How do I regularly make the volume larger as the volume fills up? I'm also not able to just buy a pile of disks and make the volume huge and move this problem far into the future.
I'm wondering about the "steady state" of an ever growing volume, and will I just eventually end up where I was, with multiple volumes of different sizes and having to manually balance the usage across the volumes??
Update: Unfortunately the data is already de-duplicated, and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. I suspect it will eventually stop growing, or old data could be purged, but I don't see that happening for a couple of years. (Thanks for the ideas though)