Did we decide ZFS is good after all this time?

AdmiralAsshat 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Who said it was bad? I thought we were all pretty much in agreement that it was good, and the only thing holding it back from wider adoption into e.g. the Linux kernel was the poison-pill of Oracle's ownership and licensing.

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natebc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

another thing holding it back is the threat of a lawsuit from Netapp.

source: used to work for a storage vendor that was marketing a NAS based on ZFS and got credible threats from Netapp to the point that we sought a partnership with Oracle that included indemnification under Oracles settlement with Netapp.

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throw0101c 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Oracle and NetApp 'mutually dismissed' in 2010:

* https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2010/09/09/oracle-and-n...

* https://www.computerworld.com/article/1585889/opinion-patent...

NetApp originally sued then-independent Sun in 2007, and Sun counter-sued.

Free/TrueNAS/iXsystems has been offering ZFS-based solutions for many years now, and I haven't heard NetApp going after them:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNAS

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXsystems

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natebc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I remember all this too. The time period that I was in this scene was AFTER 2010 though so who knows. As mentioned in response to the sibling "credible sources" bro, I was just a lowly support engineer so i had to trust that the CEO wasn't lying to us about all this.

Maybe he was ... they do that sometimes.

I looked around a little. the C&D from Netapp was in ~July 2010 and the partnership and product with Oracle in the Fall (Around the cease fire) and we continued with that (via the Oracle Partnership) through 2011-2015 when the company ran out of cash and laid us all off.

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bzmrgonz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do we add this corp. body count to Oracle then? I'm pretty sure that Oracle partnership wasn't cheap.

	▲	natebc 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Who knows. I'm sure it was pretty expensive. Was certainly more comfortable on that side of their legal desk though I'm sure.

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smartbit 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

only threats, no court cases or journalist writing about ZFS indemnification? IOW please provide links to credible sources.

	▲	natebc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		sorry, don't have a link to the CEO telling us that we were signing a partnership with oracle that included the indemnification. I was just a lowly support engineer so not privy to all the legal details that the executives were dealing with. I too had to just take them at their word. ETA: I searched a bit. Here's a link https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/networking/netapp-thr... Maybe threats were enough? I certainly wouldn't want to test it myself.

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Arainach 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

ZFS was always good. Linux support for ZFS was not so good for longer than you'd hope, but it's been reliable for some time now.

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AndroTux an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

ZFS is amazing. It feels like magic.