Item: Oracle ZFS
Rating: 10
Author: Jim Rubenstein

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle ZFS

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ZFS is a storage filesystem used on [primarly] server machines. It is used by the IT department to help fulfill our data storage needs. ZFS offers the best available technology for performance and stability, while also implementing a lot of amazing features to allow IT professionals the monitor disk health, backup disks, and recover from failures incredibly quickly and easily.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Software RAIDZ. Create storage arrays using best available RAID technologies for excellent disk stability
Array images and backups. Allows administrators to instantly create disk snapshots, to minimize time disk is unavailable (on the order of seconds, not minutes or hours).
Automatic de-deduplication/compression. ZFS will automatically de-dedup data on disk, allowing for more efficient use of the entire disk for unique data. It will also automatically compress data stored on the disk, allowing for even more usage of the available disk space. Great for infrequently accessed backups (There is some performance cost to compression).

Cons

The CLI tools have a bit of a learning curve to them, there are a lot of tools and commands available. Learning all of them is a large task.
The documentation is very dense. This is great, but makes it hard to get up to speed, incrementally, quickly.
It's still (relatively) new, so I'd expect getting buy-in from larger enterprises to be a bit of an up-hill battle.
Deploying on an existing system requires a completely separate storage array, as you need to reformat and set-up the storage devices without any data on them. This might be prohibitively expensive on time or resources to deploy on existing storage infrastructures.

Return on Investment

Less risk in data loss, due to higher stability and better disk level backup features
Faster recovery times in the event of failure, minimizing offline time in the event of failure
Great disk performance and stability, less failures means less down time.

Alternatives Considered

ext3 and ext4

ZFS is so far beyond the other filesystems available right now, offering full suites of tools for data management, backup, recovery, maintenance, monitoring, etc. It's not even fair to compare them.

Likelihood to Recommend

In our case, we use ZFS to store MySQL data. Our MySQL data is of paramount importance, and we need to ensure that the storage that it is kept on is not only fast but also reliable. We can not risk an event that would wipe out all our data. For this reason, we use ZFS to create software RAIDZ to maximize storage redundancy on each MySQL server. We also utilize the ZFS instant snapshot tools to get fully consistent backups of our data without needing to take servers offline for hours at a time.

The snapshotting tools are excellent, and allow you to migrate the snapshot data off disk very easily, and import it onto new disks just as easily (so restoring from backups is a cinch).

We find ZFS to be a perfect solution for this use case, and I'd expect anyone with similar requirements would see the same benefits.

Comments

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Our experience with ZFS in an Open Source environment