4 ms·

Did we decide ZFS is good after all this time?

• AdmiralAsshat 4mo ago
  Who said it was bad? I thought we were all pretty much in agreement that it was good, and the only thing holding it back from wider adoption into e.g. the Linux kernel was the poison-pill of Oracle's ownership and licensing.
  • natebc 4mo ago
    another thing holding it back is the threat of a lawsuit from Netapp. source: used to work for a storage vendor that was marketing a NAS based on ZFS and got credible threats from Netapp to the point that we sought a partnership with Oracle that included indemnification under Oracles settlement with Netapp.
    • smartbit 4mo ago
      only threats, no court cases or journalist writing about ZFS indemnification? IOW please provide links to credible sources.
      • natebc 4mo ago
        sorry, don't have a link to the CEO telling us that we were signing a partnership with oracle that included the indemnification. I was just a lowly support engineer so not privy to all the legal details that the executives were dealing with. I too had to just take them at their word. ETA: I searched a bit. Here's a link https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/networking/netapp-threatens-coraid-over-sales-of-open-source-zfs-technology/ https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/networking/netapp-thr... Maybe threats were enough? I certainly wouldn't want to test it myself.
    • throw0101c 4mo ago
      Oracle and NetApp 'mutually dismissed' in 2010: * https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2010/09/09/oracle-and-netapp-dismiss-zfs-lawsuits/505178 https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2010/09/09/oracle-and-n... * https://www.computerworld.com/article/1585889/opinion-patent-lawsuit-a-lose-lose-for-netapp-sun.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1585889/opinion-patent... NetApp originally sued then-independent Sun in 2007, and Sun counter-sued. Free/TrueNAS/iXsystems has been offering ZFS-based solutions for many years now, and I haven't heard NetApp going after them: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNAS * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXsystems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXsystems
      • natebc 4mo ago
        I remember all this too. The time period that I was in this scene was AFTER 2010 though so who knows. As mentioned in response to the sibling "credible sources" bro, I was just a lowly support engineer so i had to trust that the CEO wasn't lying to us about all this. Maybe he was ... they do that sometimes. I looked around a little. the C&D from Netapp was in ~July 2010 and the partnership and product with Oracle in the Fall (Around the cease fire) and we continued with that (via the Oracle Partnership) through 2011-2015 when the company ran out of cash and laid us all off.
        • bzmrgonz 4mo ago
          Do we add this corp. body count to Oracle then? I'm pretty sure that Oracle partnership wasn't cheap.
          • natebc 4mo ago
            Who knows. I'm sure it was pretty expensive. Was certainly more comfortable on that side of their legal desk though I'm sure.
  • ssl-3 4mo ago
    Some years ago, there were mud-slinging myths being thrown around about ZFS. Things like "ZFS needs 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage" and "it requires that RAM to be ECC" were once common to find online. These sort of thing seemed to lead to widespread beliefs that it was inefficient, expensive, and fragile. None of that is true, of course, but folks might remember and believe these myths and conclude that it is (or was) bad. (But it's pretty excellent. I've been using it for about a decade, now. It'd be nice if it fit into the Linux kernel better, but I manage anyway.)
    • izacus 4mo ago
      I still got told that I need 16GB of RAM to migrate my 12TB btrfs array from a Synology with 6GB of RAM (2GB actually used) - by TrueNAS people. Are they wrong?
      • ssl-3 4mo ago
        Yep. They be wrong. Many of the myths about ZFS seem to originate from the TrueNAS forums, and the working assumption is that they're motivated to be this way because they're a bunch of gatekeeping losers. More RAM is better -- of course it is. Otherwise-unused RAM can gets used for stuff like caching (such as the ZFS arc), and caches are faster than disks. That's good for performance. But ZFS isn't really any more thirsty in this way than other filesystems are, unless special features -- stuff that many other filesystems lack entirely, like deduplication -- get used. And these days, dedup can use an SSD instead of RAM for the heavy lifting so that's not a huge concern either. (Not that I'm recommending dedup; it works and it is reliable, but it doesn't fit very many workloads.) I would absolutely be comfortable running ZFS with 12TB on 6GB. Or 2GB, for that matter. It's fine. Send it. I've personally done more with less and had excellent results. No regrets. (There's ways to tune arc performance, too. As an example, I've got a dataset that is full of many terabytes of Linux ISOs. I don't need that data to be cached...like, ever. If it were to be cached, it would just consume resources that would be better spent elsewhere. But I do want it to be indexed quickly. So I set that dataset to primarycache=metadata and that works great for me.)
      • magicalhippo 4mo ago
  • p_l 4mo ago
    Actually the licensing issues were from Linux developers' side - Oracle has nothing to say (as the license to the code and patents was given before Oracle got their grubby hands), and Sun IIRC expected CDDL to work similar to the AFS precedent where non-derivative, non-GPL code was allowed into kernel. The only lawsuit specifically about licensing was from few Linux developers through SFC who disagree with common consensus on how GPL applies in that case and sued Ubuntu for shipping ZFS as a module.
• Arainach 4mo ago
  ZFS was always good. Linux support for ZFS was not so good for longer than you'd hope, but it's been reliable for some time now.
• AndroTux 4mo ago
  ZFS is amazing. It feels like magic.