I started playing with ZFS in April 2007, when we purchased a Sun X4500 fileserver at work.
This sucker had 48 SATA drives in it, 500GB each for a total of 24TB of drives. 16TB was usable after redundancy.
In the early 2010s a project to port ZFS to Linux came about, and they were successful.
I didn't trust it much at first as it was newly ported to the platform, but I could see the end of dealing with Solaris was in sight. Filesystem bliss was coming to my favorite OS.
Eventually OpenZFS project came about, and ZFS on Linux matured and became stable. Now we use it at work for all our storage needs, and I started using it at home not long ago.
There's been some licensing quibbles, but overall things are in a good place. Long live ZFS!
So yeah I used sysadmin day as an excuse to rave about my favorite filesystem. Deal with it. :)
Exactly how heavy is 48 SATA drives @zorinlynx ? Look's like in a decade or two, it'd make for a great platform to do elevated pushups. 💪 😂
... cool stuff!
@vondelphia Heh, that machine has long since gone to recycling. But it was EXTREMELY heavy. Only really felt safe lifting it between four people, though two of us could handle it if we were both strong.
It had four handles, two on each side for carrying it.
@zorinlynx ZFS is interesting, though I feel it couples a lot of independent tasks. I usually use LVM and cryptsetup to create an encrypted mapping to a LVM logical volume, and all of that is totally separate from the filesystem. Then I make an ext filesystem on the mapping, and everything proceeds from there. With ZFS, it’s like… I make a ZFS thing using ZFS encryption to a ZFS thing with a ZFS filesystem.
I don’t know much about ZFS at all though, so I’m probably barking at shadows here. I never have spare hard disks to try it on. And I certainly never had 48 SATA drives! RAID is far beyond my means. So ZFS is probably better from the perspective of someone with actual… uh… money.
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ZFS was MIND BLOWING for me at first. I was blown away by all it could do, but it was new so I didn't really fully trust it yet.
It was still only on Solaris, so we had to run Solaris to use it. It was worth that pain, though, as it made managing lots of data SO EASY.