> I'm going to pitch in here as devil's advocate and say this is hardly
> revolution. 99% of what zfs is attempting to do is something NetApp and
> WAFL have been doing for 15 years+. Regardless of the merits of their
> patents and prior art, etc., this is not something revolutionarily new. It
> may be "revolution" in the sense that it's the first time it's come to open
> source software and been given away, but it's hardly "revolutionary" in file
> systems as a whole.
"99% of what ZFS is attempting to do?" Hmm, OK -- let's make a list:
end-to-end checksums
unlimited snapshots and clones
O(1) snapshot creation
O(delta) snapshot deletion
O(delta) incremental generation
transactionally safe RAID without NVRAM
variable blocksize
block-level compression
dynamic striping
intelligent prefetch with automatic length and stride detection
ditto blocks to increase metadata replication
delegated administration
scalability to many cores
scalability to huge datasets
hybrid storage pools (flash/disk mix) that optimize price/performance
How many of those does NetApp have? I believe the correct answer is 0%.
Jeff
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
