It appears from first glance that ZFS has nearly all the features of WAFL, at least conceptually if not in practice. Are they using netapp patents I wonder?
ZFS is very similar in architecture to WAFL (In fact, I believe it was inspired by WAFL, and so is Reiser to a certain extent. At least Hans refers to it as a "well designed" filesystem.)
I like ZFS, but I wouldn't bet my paycheck with it vs. a Netapp Filer, version 7.0.1R or whatever:)
<propeller_hat> The primary percieved weakness of both is that neither is a "Cluster File System" (VxFS,Polyserve, OCFS etc.) , and those are very trendy these days, even though I don't see the point of doubling the locking overhead simply to have a high throughput file serving Cluster. (File Level *AND* block level locking seems to be a waste, pick one and use NFS or Fibre channel and your fancy CFS =)
So if you need multiple readers and writers accessing the same Filesystem via blocks, WAFL or ZFS won't work for you unless you use NFS, otherwise you're going to use the FCP/iscsi and a host based cluster FS, or some fancy Infinband Head clustering... but that has issues as well. </propeller_hat>
PS:
Regards, Max
Peter> I know which one I want.
The one that makes the most sense for my needs. After my problems with OnTap 7.0.1R1 and quotas and qtrees earlier this week, I'm a bit leary of NetApp right now. OnTap 7G is still shaking out major bugs...
As others have said, you cannot criticize an OS when you are on a very early release that was superceded months ago. We have been on 7G now for months on all our filers without any issue at all. I will say that 7g when it was released was not as stable as 6, but thats hardly surprising given the magitude of the changes.
Regards, pdg
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