My company is a team of developers and system integrators and we build cloud services for companies so they can pull stuff back from Google and Microsoft in-house to make it more efficient and use the cloud for overage services. In order to do that, we need compatible services that can run in-house, Azure, Google Cloud, or anywhere else. One of the services we are presently using is ZFS with an S3 layer on top. It matches with what most people use for storage coming out of Azure.
We are currently using Linux ZFS, which is the open-source version.
It is great for box storage, like S3 replacements.
The question is, can it do a lot better? So for example, it could run an airline, and all the computer systems, but can it do it as effectively and efficiently as it could on other systems? No. That's where you start hitting things like you could store library congress on it 50 times, but does that mean that it's usable? If you want to find a book, do you want to wait a minute to get your results back or would you rather get your results back in two seconds? ZFS can always get the job done and it's reliable but it's just not always fast enough, and that's the main problem with it.
ZFS is great for just mass storage, but if you're trying to make fast storage – something like a SAN-type delivery network where you wanted to do any type of RAM disc over the network – it falls flat. ZFS does not do that. It is kind of limiting.
For companies or organizations using Kubernetes, multiple Docker instances, or the spin-up machines needed to handle the workload need quick media just for the host itself to be able to run things quickly, but ZFS does not do that.
What's important these days is, as you run stuff as a cluster, you want to be able to replicate from one cluster to another, whether that's done in the background or is done in near real-time. ZFS just does not do anything of that nature. You have to use a third-party product or Ceph storage, which we use also. So that's why it's limiting from that standpoint.
I have been using this solution for a long time as I was one of the first to get it installed as a beta version.
I would rate the stability of this solution a 9.9 out of 10. It's super reliable.
With ZFS, I never really found anything that it couldn't do.
We are planning on increasing the current usage mainly because it is reliable but we're probably gonna run something on top of that though. Right now, we are running ZFS as the underlying storage and with an S3 or Ceph layer on top of it. And what we've been doing on a couple of the latest installs, we've been running RDMS on it, and that allows for replications so you can actually have two or three different ZFS pools and replicate between them. That seems to work really well and helps with the speed also. That's kind of our interim solution at the moment.
Considering I am one of the people that mostly help other people out when they get in crunches, I really don't ever need tech support.
From my standpoint, what I would say support-wise is the amount of documentation that's available and being able to get ahold of some of the developers when you have a problem. From that standpoint, I would rate it an eight out of 10.
I would rate the initial setup a nine out of ten, just simply because I know what the pitfalls are. I've been using it for so long, and I just know what to expect from it. I don't need manuals. I go in and help other people around the country who get stuck or who had problems and I can just walk in and help them because I just understand the product that well.
What we mostly do with ZFS is we set that up locally and we use that as private cloud storage local to the business.
From the cost standpoint, the software doesn't cost anything, and no matter what products you use, you're going to have your own and employee time invested in it. So, if you already have the hardware from another system that you're switching away from, because ZFS will run on anything, then you're not going to have a lot of costs involved. You can have a higher ROI than any other storage system just simply because the costs are much lower, so your ROI is going to be higher.
I would advise others to be very knowledgeable of the product before implementing it; do some mockups with it, including pulling a disc out while the system's running, and then try putting it back in a different order just to get a feeling for whether you are going to be able to handle it when things go wrong.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten overall. It's probably the most well-understood mainstream storage platform that exists right now for pure storage. It is not necessarily for the fastest storage or cluster storage, but just for pure storage, it's really hard to beat. It's just been around as long as anything else.
