ZFS Take-Off

Robin Haris (zdnet) and Jörg (c0t0d0s0) are writing about RAID6 respectivly ZFS.

RAID6 will surely be a marketing success as most people do not know about ZFS, or are thinking that making the move from RAID5 to RAID6 will solve all their problems. Those companies who have heard about ZFS have certainly had a look at it.

Most companies are rather conservative when implementing new technology. This is not a bad thing, especially when trusting your precious data to a new filesystem.

Paradoxically, without proper checksumming like ZFS does, your data could be at higher risk, even if ZFS is a rather new technology.

While there have been some problems with ZFS, none of them have affected the on-disk data. This is certainly the result of thoroughly testing ZFS like no other filesystem (leaving real-world "testing" beside).

There are still some issues, that may prevent ZFS to be deployed in a broader area:

-Performance issues on Storage Array with stable storage (not ignoring cache flush)
-No dynamic LUN resizing (not really a ZFS issue)
-Database performance may not be at UFS DirectIO level (work is on the way)
-No long-term database performance experience available
-Booting from ZFS not yet integrated
-3rd Party support missing (e.g. Backup solutions not yet there)

If Sun is working on these technical issues, and I know they are, my guess is that ZFS will really take off in a timeframe of 2 years. Compared with the age of UFS this is a short chapter.

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