12 ms·

Reading this just makes me think of this http://www.smbitjournal.com/2014/05/the-cult-of-zfs/ http://www.smbitjournal.com/2014/05/the-cult-of-zfs/

kev009 12y ago
This article is quite ignorant. ZFS uses integrated software RAID (in the zpool layer) for technical reasons, not merely to "shift administration into the zfs command set". Resilvering, checksumming, scrubs are all a unified concept that are file aware, not merely block aware as nearly every other RAID. The implications of this are massive and if you don't understand, please don't write an article on file systems. For various reasons, the snapshots and volume management are more usable due to the integrated design and CoW, and also as pillars for ZFS send/receive. The "write hole" piece is bullshit. ZFS is an atomic file system. It has no vulnerability to a write hole. The "file system check" piece is bullshit. Again, ZFS is an atomic file system. The ZIL is played back on a crash to catch up sync writes. A scrub is not necessary after a hard crash. Quite frankly, for any modern RAID you probably should be using ZFS unless you are a skilled systems engineer and are balancing some kind of trade off (stacking on higher level FS like gluster/ceph, fail in place, object storage, etc). You should even use ZFS on single drive systems for checksumming and CoW, and the new possibilities for system management with concepts like boot environments that let you roll back failed upgrades. Hardware RAID controller quality isn't spectacular, and the author clearly has not looked at the drivers to dish out such bad advice. You want FOSS kernel programmers handling as much of your data integrity as possible, not corporate firmware and driver developers that cycle entirely every 2 years (LSI/Avago). And there's effectively one vendor left, LSI/Avago, that makes the RAID controllers used in the enterprise. ZFS is production grade on Linux. Btrfs will be ready in 2 years, said everyone since it's inception and every 2 years thereafter. It's a pretty risky option right now, but when it's ready it delivers the same features the author tries bizarrely to dismiss in his article. ZFS is the best and safest route for RAID storage in 2014 and will remain such for at least "2 years".

kev009 12y ago

This article is quite ignorant. ZFS uses integrated software RAID (in the zpool layer) for technical reasons, not merely to "shift administration into the zfs command set". Resilvering, checksumming, scrubs are all a unified concept that are file aware, not merely block aware as nearly every other RAID. The implications of this are massive and if you don't understand, please don't write an article on file systems. For various reasons, the snapshots and volume management are more usable due to the integrated design and CoW, and also as pillars for ZFS send/receive. The "write hole" piece is bullshit. ZFS is an atomic file system. It has no vulnerability to a write hole. The "file system check" piece is bullshit. Again, ZFS is an atomic file system. The ZIL is played back on a crash to catch up sync writes. A scrub is not necessary after a hard crash. Quite frankly, for any modern RAID you probably should be using ZFS unless you are a skilled systems engineer and are balancing some kind of trade off (stacking on higher level FS like gluster/ceph, fail in place, object storage, etc). You should even use ZFS on single drive systems for checksumming and CoW, and the new possibilities for system management with concepts like boot environments that let you roll back failed upgrades. Hardware RAID controller quality isn't spectacular, and the author clearly has not looked at the drivers to dish out such bad advice. You want FOSS kernel programmers handling as much of your data integrity as possible, not corporate firmware and driver developers that cycle entirely every 2 years (LSI/Avago). And there's effectively one vendor left, LSI/Avago, that makes the RAID controllers used in the enterprise. ZFS is production grade on Linux. Btrfs will be ready in 2 years, said everyone since it's inception and every 2 years thereafter. It's a pretty risky option right now, but when it's ready it delivers the same features the author tries bizarrely to dismiss in his article. ZFS is the best and safest route for RAID storage in 2014 and will remain such for at least "2 years".