Old business: A comment on my previous post. I should have known something big was brewing when I saw the PowerPath/vStorage announcement this morning. I didn't remember it being a roadmap item and I didn't hear anything about it through the grape vine. Though it wasn't like I was looking.
EMC can keep secrets even from me.
I've updated the post with a few additional comments at the bottom.
New business: Before we begin a disclaimer. I am neither a file system developer/designer nor a lawyer. These are just my observations as an end user and enthusiast. Comments and corrections always welcome.
Today as Wall Street crumbled and geeks lived it up in Vegas at VMworld (Party like the world is ending folks. In the finance sector it might well be), startup greenBytes came out of stealth to offer ZFS+. Perhaps Tuesday would have been a better day to emerge into the sunlight but they managed to get some coverage anyway with Steve F. and Beth P. taking notice.
ZFS is interesting and I've mucked around with it a bit. It's all File Systems sitting in zPools (Storage pools created from..) vdevs (Block devices) and has new sets of terminology for us to learn. I'm thinking we go back to the IBM days of calling HDs "Fixed Disks" and we leave it at that.
But as well as all the things about ZFS covered when it launched the frequently overlooked point is you get single parity RAID-Z, double parity RAID-Z2, Mirroring and Snapshots right out of the box.
Single. Dual. Mirror. Snap.
That's actually a lot more than some storage startups come to market with today. It's actually more than some storage companies offer today.
So isn't it an ideal platform to bring value add to? greenBytes think so, they've done so and I'm glad to see it happen. They're offering MAID and de-dup and perhaps even a gzip port for compression.
Yes their hardware is a rebranded Sun server but that's because it needs to be. To do what they want to do the system needs 64 Bit CPUs and has to be stuffed to the gills with RAM. The fact they don't have to worry about drivers, which they would if they used some other vendors box, is also a plus.
And there's the rub you see.
All of this magic is happening in OpenSolaris instead of in Linux so drivers are always an issue.
Probably 95% or more of storage startups standardize on Linux with it's rich set of drivers, multitude of tools and hyper-active development community as they get a lot before the write a line of code but ZFS isn't available on Linux unless you're willing to use ZFS-FUSE (ZFS running in user space) and discussions about ZFS-FUSE performance appear to run the gamut of "Okay but not great" to "Was there an ice age?" depending on who you ask and what they were doing.
So without further performance optimization ZFS-FUSE is no help for a storage startup right now. Yes there's a FreeBSD port but there are questions about that. Those who don't write code assumed Apple's Darwin mishmash of XNU kernel and various BSD components would have made for an easy ZFS port from FreeBSD.
Except Apple didn't use the FreeBSD port. They're porting the OpenSolaris code. So we're back there again and we now get the impression that others would go for the OpenSolaris code over the BSD code as well since Apple obviously thought about this.
So the point is I don't think we'll see a proliferation of ZFS using storage startups until the legal hurdles between Sun's CDDL and the GPL can be cleared away. I can't see a ton of startups throwing in their lot with OpenSolaris as they take on too much extra plumbing by not going with Linux.
Then there's the whole porting ZFS to Linux thing which is probably going to take an Apple like effort and a number of years of work.
Hope does spring eternal. ZFS creator Jeff Bonwick entertained Linus Torvalds at his home a few months ago leading to the DiCaprio/Winslet soft focus romance shot you see opposite. As subtle as a brick through a glass window the post was tagged "ZFS" so they weren't talking exclusively about bee keeping or microbreweries. Though both topics may have come up in passing.
Will ZFS come to Linux? Only lawyers and coders can say for sure but I'm certain the Linux community wouldn't turn up their nose at a GPL ZFS port. And neither would storage startups.
But we're not there.
Yet.
