Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
Does anyone have anything beyond own impressions and war stories? Is anyone collecting statistics on storage solutions sold? Hans J. Albertsson From my Nexus 5 Den 12 jan 2015 15:24 skrev Schweiss, Chip c...@innovates.com: On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 8:17 AM, Andrew Gabriel illu...@cucumber.demon.co.uk wrote: Since you mention Sun/Oracle, I don't see them pushing ZFS very much anymore, although I am aware their engineers still work on it. Oracle pushes ZFS hard and aggressively. I dare you to fill out their contact form or download their virtual appliance demo. Their sales people will be calling within the hour. We just recently went through a bidding war on an HA + DR system with 1/2 PB useable storage with many vendors including Nexenta and Oracle. Oracle was price competitive with Nexenta and is in my opinion a much more polished product. We still chose to build our own on OmniOS because we could still do that for about 1/2 the price of Oracle / Nexenta. That's less than 1/4 the price of 3par/HP, IBM, Dell/Compellent BTW, our OmniOS build is on the exact same hardware, Nexenta would have been. -Chip ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
Nexenta alone is probably around an Exabyte of licensed installations, and that's a mix of displaced traditional storage vendors, and new growth in old and new companies. There are many ZFS-based storage vendors in addition to Nexenta. The traditional 'big 8' storage vendors charged $9B for 9EB storage in 2012, which averages $1000/TB, and they have really struggled to reduce costs - instead they've lost market share to many of the new storage providers who produce products costing only a small fraction of that. Can you think of any other filesystem which is being adopted by OS and appliance distributions at anything like the rate of ZFS? Since you mention Sun/Oracle, I don't see them pushing ZFS very much anymore, although I am aware their engineers still work on it. Hans J Albertsson wrote: Thanks for your views, the serial storage (tape mostly?) problem is news to me but otherwise I concur. I was mostly asking about success and market presence, i e is ZFS being widely used in any non-Sun/Oracle part of the workplace? Hans J. Albertsson ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 8:17 AM, Andrew Gabriel illu...@cucumber.demon.co.uk wrote: Since you mention Sun/Oracle, I don't see them pushing ZFS very much anymore, although I am aware their engineers still work on it. Oracle pushes ZFS hard and aggressively. I dare you to fill out their contact form or download their virtual appliance demo. Their sales people will be calling within the hour. We just recently went through a bidding war on an HA + DR system with 1/2 PB useable storage with many vendors including Nexenta and Oracle. Oracle was price competitive with Nexenta and is in my opinion a much more polished product. We still chose to build our own on OmniOS because we could still do that for about 1/2 the price of Oracle / Nexenta. That's less than 1/4 the price of 3par/HP, IBM, Dell/Compellent BTW, our OmniOS build is on the exact same hardware, Nexenta would have been. -Chip ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
Thanks for your views, the serial storage (tape mostly?) problem is news to me but otherwise I concur. I was mostly asking about success and market presence, i e is ZFS being widely used in any non-Sun/Oracle part of the workplace? Hans J. Albertsson From my Nexus 5 Den 12 jan 2015 12:38 skrev Jonathan Adams t12nsloo...@gmail.com: ZFS is the most advanced filesystem on the planet IMHO, we have been using it for 10+ years in production. There are reasons not to use it, but they are usually limitations not related to ZFS itself. We used to use tape backup for our old UFS systems, and it came as a shock when we couldn't use tapes with ZFS easily ... but we just bit the bullet and realised that tapes were a dead technology, and just went for ZFS snapshots and keeping offline'd disks in the fireproof safe. There is some fragmentation, Solaris 11 has an incompatible version of ZFS, at least for now. ZFS on Linux doesn't come compiled into the kernel by default, which means that you can't have a ZFS root and update the kernel at the same time, without being _very_ _careful_! ZFS on USB in Solaris is a little flaky, but that's not down to the ZFS, it's down to the USB support, and when the ZFS root system fails the whole system is unrecoverable. ... Seriously though, ZFS does more than any other file system, it is more robust and it's easier to manage ... all other filesystems are useless in comparison. BTRFS, don't go there, it's a poor man's ZFS, the Microsoft equivalent likewise shouldn't even be in the same sentence. Just my 2cents. Jon On 12 January 2015 at 11:13, Hans J. Albertsson hans.j.alberts...@gmail.com wrote: I know FreeNAS has turned to ZFS only, OSv is ZFS only, and NAS Appliances running ZFS turn up in unexpected places, but is it really anything like an even half-baked success, at least of sorts??? A friend (long time, extremely irritating acquantance) claims ZFS is a complete failure, and will just disappear.. I realised I had no idea at all! Anyone able to shed some light on this?? ZFS should be the rage of the town, I think, but maybe I'm just being fundamentalistic ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
most NAS systems that I've come across recently fall into 2 systems: 1) ZFS 2) Hardware RAID there don't appear to be any other alternatives out there, and for my money I wouldn't ever go back to hardware RAID, if the controller fails you can lose everything! We're not a Sun company, although we have quite a bit of Sun/Fujitsu kit ... but our latest big boxes are all home-built Free-NAS systems, because they run ZFS. Jon On 12 January 2015 at 13:24, Hans J Albertsson hans.j.alberts...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for your views, the serial storage (tape mostly?) problem is news to me but otherwise I concur. I was mostly asking about success and market presence, i e is ZFS being widely used in any non-Sun/Oracle part of the workplace? Hans J. Albertsson From my Nexus 5 Den 12 jan 2015 12:38 skrev Jonathan Adams t12nsloo...@gmail.com: ZFS is the most advanced filesystem on the planet IMHO, we have been using it for 10+ years in production. There are reasons not to use it, but they are usually limitations not related to ZFS itself. We used to use tape backup for our old UFS systems, and it came as a shock when we couldn't use tapes with ZFS easily ... but we just bit the bullet and realised that tapes were a dead technology, and just went for ZFS snapshots and keeping offline'd disks in the fireproof safe. There is some fragmentation, Solaris 11 has an incompatible version of ZFS, at least for now. ZFS on Linux doesn't come compiled into the kernel by default, which means that you can't have a ZFS root and update the kernel at the same time, without being _very_ _careful_! ZFS on USB in Solaris is a little flaky, but that's not down to the ZFS, it's down to the USB support, and when the ZFS root system fails the whole system is unrecoverable. ... Seriously though, ZFS does more than any other file system, it is more robust and it's easier to manage ... all other filesystems are useless in comparison. BTRFS, don't go there, it's a poor man's ZFS, the Microsoft equivalent likewise shouldn't even be in the same sentence. Just my 2cents. Jon On 12 January 2015 at 11:13, Hans J. Albertsson hans.j.alberts...@gmail.com wrote: I know FreeNAS has turned to ZFS only, OSv is ZFS only, and NAS Appliances running ZFS turn up in unexpected places, but is it really anything like an even half-baked success, at least of sorts??? A friend (long time, extremely irritating acquantance) claims ZFS is a complete failure, and will just disappear.. I realised I had no idea at all! Anyone able to shed some light on this?? ZFS should be the rage of the town, I think, but maybe I'm just being fundamentalistic ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
[OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
I know FreeNAS has turned to ZFS only, OSv is ZFS only, and NAS Appliances running ZFS turn up in unexpected places, but is it really anything like an even half-baked success, at least of sorts??? A friend (long time, extremely irritating acquantance) claims ZFS is a complete failure, and will just disappear.. I realised I had no idea at all! Anyone able to shed some light on this?? ZFS should be the rage of the town, I think, but maybe I'm just being fundamentalistic ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
ZFS is the most advanced filesystem on the planet IMHO, we have been using it for 10+ years in production. There are reasons not to use it, but they are usually limitations not related to ZFS itself. We used to use tape backup for our old UFS systems, and it came as a shock when we couldn't use tapes with ZFS easily ... but we just bit the bullet and realised that tapes were a dead technology, and just went for ZFS snapshots and keeping offline'd disks in the fireproof safe. There is some fragmentation, Solaris 11 has an incompatible version of ZFS, at least for now. ZFS on Linux doesn't come compiled into the kernel by default, which means that you can't have a ZFS root and update the kernel at the same time, without being _very_ _careful_! ZFS on USB in Solaris is a little flaky, but that's not down to the ZFS, it's down to the USB support, and when the ZFS root system fails the whole system is unrecoverable. ... Seriously though, ZFS does more than any other file system, it is more robust and it's easier to manage ... all other filesystems are useless in comparison. BTRFS, don't go there, it's a poor man's ZFS, the Microsoft equivalent likewise shouldn't even be in the same sentence. Just my 2cents. Jon On 12 January 2015 at 11:13, Hans J. Albertsson hans.j.alberts...@gmail.com wrote: I know FreeNAS has turned to ZFS only, OSv is ZFS only, and NAS Appliances running ZFS turn up in unexpected places, but is it really anything like an even half-baked success, at least of sorts??? A friend (long time, extremely irritating acquantance) claims ZFS is a complete failure, and will just disappear.. I realised I had no idea at all! Anyone able to shed some light on this?? ZFS should be the rage of the town, I think, but maybe I'm just being fundamentalistic ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
Couple of points and counter points from my own experience. *) tape really isn't dead. No, really. at about $.01/GB/copy, and 1x10^20 bit error rate, you can't beat it. Use it for the right thing though. This excels as an offline archival media with media lifetimes expected at around 30 years. Contrast that to cheap disk. Everybody forgets that you still have to account for the chassis, memory, space, transportability, media bandwidth, brackets, cpus, and power used by an online storage system. Also, if you go with the really inexpensive disks to keep costs down, you sacrifice 5 orders of magnitude of media reliability when compared to tape. Seriously. There's a place for both. Places serious about data integrity and offsite archive at good cost still use tape. it's not dead. It's not even dying contrary to what some popular reading might say in some places. You can backup zfs to tape using zfs diff to get your list and then whatever mechanism you want to get those items to tape (rsync, tsm, whatever). The point is, that full-filesystem-scan for backups is definitely dead. Don't do that. There are better mechanisms. Full scan doesn't scale. *) ZFS is really cool and all. We use it a lot! To say it is unquestionably the best might be a bit of an overstatement. GPFS is also really cool, and arguably better in many ways. The erasure coding in the new de-clustered RAID is better than ZFS in terms of rebuild time and certain rare causes of data loss. GPFS allows easy separation of metadata onto fast storage for index and search. The GPFS policy engine is way cool. You can arbitrarily relayout your GPFS across storage. You can have pools of different characteristics and do policy migration or data placement policies arbitrarily to use them. (We STILL can't do any relayout of any kind on ZFS. Argh). The big downside is price, of course. There are plenty of free ZFS solutions available but none for GPFS. BTRFS has a technological edge over zfs in relayout as well. Why isn't it possible to shrink/relayout ZFS still? IMHO this should have been delivered about 2 years ago. As far as stability and marketshare go, ZFS gets the big win, naturally. On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 9:56 AM, Hans J Albertsson hans.j.alberts...@gmail.com wrote: Does anyone have anything beyond own impressions and war stories? Is anyone collecting statistics on storage solutions sold? Hans J. Albertsson From my Nexus 5 Den 12 jan 2015 15:24 skrev Schweiss, Chip c...@innovates.com: On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 8:17 AM, Andrew Gabriel illu...@cucumber.demon.co.uk wrote: Since you mention Sun/Oracle, I don't see them pushing ZFS very much anymore, although I am aware their engineers still work on it. Oracle pushes ZFS hard and aggressively. I dare you to fill out their contact form or download their virtual appliance demo. Their sales people will be calling within the hour. We just recently went through a bidding war on an HA + DR system with 1/2 PB useable storage with many vendors including Nexenta and Oracle. Oracle was price competitive with Nexenta and is in my opinion a much more polished product. We still chose to build our own on OmniOS because we could still do that for about 1/2 the price of Oracle / Nexenta. That's less than 1/4 the price of 3par/HP, IBM, Dell/Compellent BTW, our OmniOS build is on the exact same hardware, Nexenta would have been. -Chip ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
Schweiss, Chip wrote: On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 8:17 AM, Andrew Gabriel illu...@cucumber.demon.co.uk wrote: Since you mention Sun/Oracle, I don't see them pushing ZFS very much anymore, although I am aware their engineers still work on it. Oracle pushes ZFS hard and aggressively. I dare you to fill out their contact form or download their virtual appliance demo. Their sales people will be calling within the hour. OK, that's good to hear. During a year of working with very many customers in the UK tendering for storage (including some former Sun openstorage customers), I only saw Oracle bidding their ZFS storage appliance in one case. I did come across several more cases of customers building their own systems using Oracle Solaris 11 on third party hardware, but that's not something Oracle pushes. ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 8:24 AM, Hans J Albertsson hans.j.alberts...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for your views, the serial storage (tape mostly?) problem is news to me but otherwise I concur. While you can always zfs send the filesystem to a tape, it's not recommended to do this sort of thing unless you have fallbacks because one missing bit would destroy the whole image. That said, it works well and is the pattern Joyent's using to distribute images on SmartOS, so it's quite viable and performant in practise. For archive, though, use something designed for the purpose. I was mostly asking about success and market presence, i e is ZFS being widely used in any non-Sun/Oracle part of the workplace? As mentioned in previous message, zfs escaped Sun/Oracle in 2009. Their relevancy to zfs is trending sharply downward, by their own uncooperative hand. ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] A ZFS related question: How successful is ZFS, really???
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 6:38 AM, Jonathan Adams t12nsloo...@gmail.com wrote: ZFS is the most advanced filesystem on the planet IMHO, we have been using it for 10+ years in production. +1 There is some fragmentation, Solaris 11 has an incompatible version of ZFS, at least for now. In the same fashion as Microsoft tried to embrace, extend, extinguish Java, Oracle's purposely trying to break compatibility with the mainstream zfs community here, I think. Since it works very well on Illumos, SmartOS, Nexenta, Coraid, Linux, FreeBSD and many others I'm probably not even aware of now, it probably scares Oracle as they're no longer in control of this thing that they purport to own. Heck, they're not even relevant regarding real world development and deployment of it anymore. The rest of the community is being cohesive about understanding zfs versions, features, etc. Peep this: http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/ZFS Seriously though, ZFS does more than any other file system, it is more robust and it's easier to manage ... all other filesystems are useless in comparison. well put; +1 BTRFS, don't go there, it's a poor man's ZFS, the Microsoft equivalent likewise shouldn't even be in the same sentence. yeah, +1 but I haven't even checked it out deeply.. BTRFS (butterface) is likely just a NIH / licensing religious artifact / vaporware. ___ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
