Comment by sfoskett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfoskett | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I realize that not everyone lives in the world of enterprise storage, so I appreciate your question.

ZFS is a filesystem (and also kind of a volume manager) and is designed to be fairly versatile and to run alongside an OS and applications. ZFS includes some impressive features long found in enterprise arrays, including snapshots, mirroring, replication, RAID, and data protection.

Dedicated storage arrays have long supported many more specialized features, and I urge you to read up on cool products like Pure FlashArray, NetApp SolidFire, EMC Unity, EMC Isilon, HPE Nimble Storage, Tintri, etc. You'll see that most/all have awesome hybrid (flash/disk) capabilities, all-flash tuning, integration with VMware, Windows Server, and Docker, scale-out capability, etc.

It's a pretty amazing field, and that's why I've dedicated my professional career specializing in enterprise storage. Maybe a good place to start is the Storage Field Day video series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22Storage%20Fi...

> ZFS includes some impressive features long found in enterprise arrays, including snapshots, mirroring, replication, RAID, and data protection.

This is why NetApp sued Sun in 2007, claiming patent infringement.

I worked in a data center that stored medical records around that time. We were moving off of a StorageTek PowderHorn 9310 (that thing was mesmerizing) to some multi-cabinet EMC spinning disk array. You couldn't get access to that thing without hooking up a FC HBA to the SAN. Fast-forward a few years and I found myself in a similar job at a much smaller e-commerce firm. We had some old finicky NetApp filers we ended up getting rid of in favor of Sun Storage 7000 storage appliances running ZFS. Both of them supported replication, but the Sun Storage appliances were far better.

Yeah, SAN and NAS are two different things, but there's a lot of money, a lot of shared technology, and a lot of similar use cases that have driven convergence over the last decade or two.

There are all-flash based and hybrid ZFS configurations from some vendors, so I don't understand how that's a point.

As for the rest, I was looking for more concrete comparisons, and third-party software integrations don't seem relevant to this conversation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com