1) Support for large volumes: 8EB vs 16TB (Ext4)
2) Support for large file sizes: 1EB vs 16TB (Ext4)
3) Support for large number of subfolders: Ext3 has a 32k subfolder limit
4) Online defrag support (supported in Ext4)
For us, we had to use XFS for MySQL multi-tenent applications.
* XFS had corruption issues back in the day with specific kernels (2.6.9, that's the one I remember).
df -h | grep md127 ; mount | grep md127
/dev/md127 26T 14T 12T 55% /home/data
/dev/md127 on /home/data type ext4 (rw,relatime,stripe=1792,data=ordered)
Ext3 was 32k, but ext4 is 65k subfolder limit. I have run into this one before. The real solution is to do directory hashing when you get this crazy with tons of subfolders.
"EXT4 [on RHEL7] [Cerfified max FS size:] 50TB [Theoretical max FS size:] (1EB)"
Moreover, RedHat's lack of Enterprise Support for a configuration doesn't mean that that configuration is a bad idea, or is doomed to failure. :)
So, firstly, both Red Hat and ext4 support FSs larger than 16TB. So, yeah.
Secondly, I mean, Ted Ts'o works for Google, rather than Red Hat, so it's not like Red Hat has any special insight into the inner workings of ext4. RHEL's lack of "support" for ext4 FSs large than a certain size wouldn't make me wary of using FSs larger than that size.
Ts'o & co. seem to be pretty careful, so I would expect that the worst that would happen would be performance issues.
Regarding Tso & co, I am not so optimistic. How they communicate on the mailing list is more like: "Look we wrote this, it runs on my laptop fine it might work for other workloads too". There is no extensive test coverage run by against ext4 (at least I am not aware of it). This is not the first data loss bug in the ext4 codebase. Few years from now when enough users start to use it an get rid off these serious bugs from the code, I might even consider POCing it again.
I read that mailing list tone as something more like "This software is offered without warranty and might shave your dog and weld your toilet seat down.". I mean, folks on the LKML talk in that manner about their patches, too.
Also, even XFS has had severe data loss bugs in the distant past [1] and much more recently. [2]
[0] http://oss.sgi.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xfs/cmds/xfstests.gi...
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.1... (Note in particular the last comment that describes this as "not a bug, but a feature!".)
[2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.xfs.general/... (fixed in RHEL in 2013(!))