Re: ZFS honesty

Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 22:58 +0000, 韓家標 Bill Hacker wrote:
> <snip>
>> None are perfect. But ZFS is just *too* new. And not just on *BSD.
>> If IBM had not already had GPFS, Sun might never even have 'invented' ZFS.

> Could you by any chance elaborate -- from the information available to
> me, I did not get an impression that ZFS is the cluster-aware filesystem
> or will ever be one.

 From the Wikipedia article on Lustre...

"...Sun completed its acquisition of Cluster File Systems, Inc., including the 
Lustre file system, on October 2, 2007, with the intention of bringing the 
benefits of Lustre technologies to Sun's ZFS file system and the Solaris 
operating system."

So Sun has had what? 2+ months? to try to fill a ZFS 'hole' that was worth a 
major investment? See also traffic on *Sun's* ZFS list.

Adds up to a tacit admission of 'not quite there yet' to me...

>  OTOH that's all GPFS is.

Far more features than that - 'robust', 'fault tolerant', 'Disaster Recovery' 
... all the usual buzzwords.

And nothing prevents using 'cluster' tools on a single box. Not storage-wise anyway.

More importantly - GPFS has just under ten years in the market, and has become a 
primary player in Supercomputing as well as video on demand et al.

BTW: UFS(1) / FFS - have very respectable upper-bounds  - UFS2 even more so, so 
(even) Sun is not totally dependent on ZFS. Unless they choose to become so...

Finally - the principle architect/miracle worker of ZFS on FreeBSD - pjd_at_ - 
seems to be  heavily committed on other matters now, and may be so for some time 
to come.

Ergo 'caution' remains appropriate for production use w/r ZFS - perhaps until 8.X.

Bill