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My understanding is that XFS is now default because it has far better support than ext4 for large (hundreds of TB to PB) volumes. In addition, RedHat employs many core XFS members.

With the quashing of the slow metadata performance (http://lwn.net/Articles/476263/), XFS seems to be all-round just as good as ext4 but with more future-proofiness for large volumes. Keep in mind that RHEL releases are supported for around a decade.

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The new release increases ext4 from 16TB to 50TB and xfs from 100TB to 500TB.

Sure, but these are mostly just arbitrary caps. xfs performance at 50TB is supposed to be better than ext4 at 50TB. I don't know what xfs actually does over ext4, but I do know a little bit about ext4; on-disk it looks very similar to the ancient Unix FFS. xfs may use more scalable on-disk structures.

Looks like XFS supports concurrency better (both on the request side, and on the kernel<->backing store side).

Back in the day, we used xfs instead of ext3 so that when something happened and there was a bad shutdown, our samba servers weren't stuck in fsck for an hour (or a day).

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