OpenSolaris

[Wim Kerkhoff]

Does anyone here use OpenSolaris? or even tried it out? ZFS is really
cool.

Linux is boring, it's time for something new...

[Carl Forde]

Wim, ZFS is open source--it should be possible to use it on Linux too, however there are licensing problems. 

There is still talk of implementing it on Linux though: KQ Infotech's ZFS port announcement. 

There was talk of Apple adopting it in Mac OS in 10.5 and then again in 10.6. But all mentions of ZFS on Apple's web sites have been removed with no explanation. 

ZFS is a very interesting file system, what is your interest in it?

Carl Forde

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
-- Winston Churchill

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[Wim Kerkhoff]

ZFS actually does run under FUSE, but that's very slow compared to native ZFS. One benchmark I saw said ZFS-FUSE provides something like 30% of native ZFS performance.

FreeNAS (BSD based) has ZFS support. But that project is unstable (IMO) right now, because the main developer has decided to rebuild based on Linux (without ZFS) since he's tired of hacking BSD drivers rather then focusing on the NAS aspect.

There is also Nexenta (http://www.nexenta.org/) which uses OpenSolaris kernel, but a familiar Ubuntu userland.

My main interest is to use it for both NFS and iSCSI (via the COMSTAR target).

The main things I love about it so far:

- no need for expensive RAID5/6 cards

- no need to mange hardware RAID + LVM + Linux filesystem (eg ext3) + NAS protocol. ZFS does it all

- builtin in compression! And the latest ZFS also has block deduplication. Great for central VMware ESXi storage

- very very fast

- can utilize separate physical medium (eg SSD) for cache

Wim