OpenZFS Archives - Storage Gaga

OpenZFS 2.0 exciting new future

By cfheoh | October 19, 2020 - 7:38 pm |October 19, 2020 Clusters, Datto, deduplication, Deduplication, Delphix, Disks, Filesystems, Flash, FreeNAS, High Performance Computing, IBM, Intel, iXsystems, Joyent, Linux, Lustre, NAS, Nexenta, Oracle, Panasas, Panzura, Performance Caching, RAID, Reliability, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage, Solid State Devices

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The OpenZFS (virtual) Developer Summit ended over a weekend ago. I stayed up a bit (not much) to listen to some of the talks because it started midnight my time, and ran till 5am on the first day, and 2am on the second day. Like a giddy schoolboy, I was excited, not because I am working for iXsystems™ now, but I have been a fan and a follower of the ZFS file system for a long time.

History wise, ZFS was conceived at Sun Microsystems in 2005. I started working on ZFS reselling Nexenta in 2009 (my first venture into business with my company nextIQ) after I was professionally released by EMC early that year. I bought a Sun X4150 from one of Sun’s distributors, and started creating a lab server. I didn’t like the workings of NexentaStor (and NexentaCore) very much, and it was priced at 8TB per increment. Later, I started my second company with a partner and it was him who showed me the elegance and beauty of ZFS through the command lines. The creed of ZFS as a volume and a file system at the same time with the CLI had an effect on me. I was in love.

OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020 Logo

Exciting developments

Among the many talks shared in the OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020 , there were a few ideas and developments which were exciting to me. Here are 3 which I liked and I provide some commentary about them.

Block Reference Table
dRAID (declustered RAID)
Persistent L2ARC

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Give back or no give

By cfheoh | September 7, 2020 - 9:15 am |September 5, 2020 Amazon Web Services, Ceph, Cloud, Datto, Filesystems, FreeNAS, Gluster, Hadoop, iXsystems, Joyent, Linux, Lustre, Microsoft, Minio, NAS, Nexenta, Openstack, QNAP, Redhat, SuSE, Synology, Tegile

Open Source bag of worms

Even with the concerted efforts of the open source communities and projects, there were many situations which have caused frictions and inadvertently, major issues as well. There are several open source projects licenses, and they are not always compatible when different open source projects mesh together for the greater good.

On the storage side of things, 2 “incidents” caught the attention of the masses. For instance, Linus Torvalds, Linux BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) and emperor supremo said “Don’t use ZFS” partly due to the ignorance and incompatibility of Linux GPL (General Public License) and ZFS CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). That ruffled some feathers amongst the OpenZFS community that Matt Ahrens, the co-creator of the ZFS file system and OpenZFS community leader had to defend OpenZFS from Linus’ comments.

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The instant value of Open Source Storage

By cfheoh | August 24, 2020 - 9:15 am |August 23, 2020 Apple, Appliance, Ceph, Filesystems, FreeNAS, Gluster, iXsystems, Minio, NAS, Object Storage, Openstack, Software Defined Storage, TrueNAS

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[ Full disclosure: I work for iXsystems™ . Opinions and views are mine. ]

TrueNAS Open Storage logo

The story began …

It was 2011. A friend of a friend called me out of the blue. He was rambling about his company’s storage needs. I recalled vividly that he wanted 100TB, and Dell and HP (before HPE) were hopeless doing NAS (network attached storage) in an Apple environment. They assembled a Frankenstein-ish NAS and plastered a price over MYR$100K around it.

In his environment, the Apple workstations were connected to dozens of WD Cloud Book storage (whatever it was called back then), daisy chained via Firewire to each other. I recalled one workstation had 3 WD “books” daisy chained together. They got the exploding storage needs but performance sucked. With every 2nd or 3rd user, access to files were at a snail pace, taking up to more than 2 minutes to open a file sometimes.

At that time, my old colleague at Sun was fervently talking about ZFS and OpenSolaris™. I told him about this opportunity, and so we began. It was him who used the word “crafter”. “We are not building“, he said, “we are crafting“. He was right.

OpenSolaris logo

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The True Value of TrueNAS CORE

By cfheoh | July 20, 2020 - 9:00 am |July 21, 2020 Appliance, BeeGFS, CIFS, Clusters, Data Direct Networks, Datto, Filesystems, FreeNAS, High Performance Computing, iXsystems, Joyent, Linux, Lustre, NAS, NetApp, Nexenta, NFS, Pure Storage, QNAP, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Tegile, TrueNAS

The real proving grounds

I have been in enterprise storage for a long time. If I were to count the days I entered the industry, that was more than 28 years ago. When people talked about their first PC (personal computer), they would say Atari or Commodore 64, or something retro that was meant for home use. Not me.

My first computer I was affiliated with was a SUN SPARC®station 2 (SS2). I took it home (from the company I was working with), opened it apart, and learned about the SBUS. My computer life started with a technology that was meant for the businesses, for the enterprise. Heck, I even installed and supported a few of the Sun E10000 for 2 years when I was with Sun Microsystems. Since that SS2, my pursuit of knowledge, experience and worldview evolved around storage technologies for the enterprise.

Open source software has also always interested me. I tried a few file systems including Lustre®, that parallel file system that powered some of the world’s supercomputers and I am a certified BeeGFS® Systems Engineer too. In the end, for me, and for many, the real proving grounds isn’t on personal and home use. It is about a storage systems and an OS that are built for the enterprise.

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Cloud Sync Prowess of FreeNAS

By cfheoh | May 4, 2020 - 9:00 am |May 4, 2020 Appliance, Business Continuity, CIFS, Cloud, Data Availability, Data Management, Data Protection, Data Security, Disaster Recovery, Dropbox, Filesystems, FreeNAS, Google, iconik, iXsystems, Katana Logic, Linux, NAS, NetApp, NFS, SMB, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage, TrueNAS, Wasabi Cloud

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The COVID-19 situation has driven technology to find new ways to adapt to the new digital workspace. Difficulty in remote access to content files and media assets has disrupted the workflow of the practitioners of many business segments. Many are trying to find ways to get the files and folders into their home computers and laptops to do work when they were used to getting them from the regular NAS shared drives.

These challenges have put hybrid cloud file sharing into the forefront, making it the best possible option to access the NAS folders and files inside and outside the boundaries of the company’s network. However, end users are pressured to invest into new technologies to adjust to this new normal. It does not have to be this way, because FreeNAS™ (and in that aspect TrueNAS®) has plenty of cloud help to offer. Most of the features are Free!

TrueNAS Core replacing FreeNAS in version 12.0

[ Note: FreeNAS™ will become TrueNAS® Core in the release 12. News was announced 2 months ago ]

FreeNAS™ Cloud Sync

One of the underrated features of FreeNAS™ is Cloud Sync. It was released in version 11.1 and it is invaluable extending the hybrid cloud file sharing to the masses. Cloud Sync makes the shares available to public cloud services such as AWS S3, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Microsoft Blob Storage, Microsoft OneDrive, pCloud, Wasabi™ Cloud and more. This means that the files and folders used within the NAS space in the LAN, can synchronized and used through the public cloud services mentioned.

There are 2 steps to setup Cloud Sync.

Add the Cloud Credentials for the cloud provider to use
Create the Cloud Sync Task

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Tag Archives: OpenZFS