ZFS Do commercial NAS manufacturers use ZFS technology?

[northbsd]

I am quite new to the world of FreeBSD, so please bear with me.

In these commercial NASs, customers could add HDDs to it whenever they want to. I am just curious if these commercial NASs use ZFS. Because, AFAIK, you can not add HDDs to an established vdev anymore. Therefore, what kind of software do these commercial NAS manufacturers use for their NAS products?

Thanks,

 

[usdmatt]

Which commercial NAS devices are you referring to? They all do things their own way. Drobo have their own RAID software which allows arrays to be extended and use various sizes of disks, I have no idea how that works, never had one. Netgear's original X-RAID ('Xtensible' RAID) was just using Linux md which allowed disks to be added. They also did a lot messing about in the background, splitting disks into smaller partitions and RAIDing the partitions across different disks to allow disks of different sizes to be used, whilst making use of as much disk space as possible.

Some commercial NAS's will just use off the shelf hardware controllers, and will support extending arrays of the controller supports it. Many hardware controllers support extending parity based arrays.

The big guys like NetApp use their own RAID hardware and software, although they probably don't use the term NAS to refer to their enterprise kit. NetApp actually use FreeBSD but every part of the system that interacts with users and the disks is custom.

There are a few devices on the market that use ZFS. I've come across some over the past few years, although I can't name any off the top of my head (other than FreeNAS/TrueNAS). I've no doubt any devices built on ZFS will have the same limitation when it comes to extending parity vdevs. The Netgear 'ReadyDATA' devices use ZFS as far as I'm aware, or at least did originally. They may have moved to BTRFS now, which they have done with their newer ReadyNAS business kit.

 

[Oko]

There are a few devices on the market that use ZFS. I've come across some over the past few years, although I can't name any off the top of my head (other than FreeNAS/TrueNAS).

NexentaStor is just one of many commercial OpenSolaris or more recently Illumos distribution optimized for virtualization, storage area networks, network-attached storage, and iSCSI or Fibre Channel applications employing the ZFS file system.

I've no doubt any devices built on ZFS will have the same limitation when it comes to extending parity vdevs. The Netgear 'ReadyDATA' devices use ZFS as far as I'm aware, or at least did originally. They may have moved to BTRFS now, which they have done with their newer ReadyNAS business kit.

I would think that people would be wiser to wait with the move to BTRFS until that file system migrate from fairy tales to real world For now if you have to use Linux stick with all trusted Silicon Graphics XFS because Linux has no serious native file system worth bragging.

@OP Many commercial vendors have their own proprietary file systems which address particular problems. Opting for ZFS due to legal reasons is rather tricky thing. For example Apple gave up on ZFS due to legal issues. You also seems to believe that ZFS is FreeBSD product. ZFS is a brain child of Sun Microsystems corporation and only due to generosity/foolishness of that company is now part of FreeBSD.

 

[usdmatt]

I wouldn't touch BTRFS with a long stick, but then I don't really like Linux anyway. OP just asked what software commercial NAS boxes used, and I listed the ones I know about. I know Netgear use BTRFS, as their newer devices are a PITA and we've had to send them logs (full of BTRFS messages) several times.

It's a shame Apple gave up on ZFS (I know OpenZFS is available for OSX now but it's not quite the same as being a first-class fully supported file system in the base OS). It may have been the legal battle between NetApp and Sun that made them give up, but as far as I'm aware that's all done now and there's no particular legal reason why companies can't use OpenZFS in products. It probably wouldn't have performed as well as the default HFS, but there was an interesting discussion on Slashdot a while ago about how most computers these days come off the shelf with single 1 TB+ hard disks, formatted with standard NTFS, HFS, EXT file systems. These are big enough that it's reasonably likely some users will suffer corruption at some point, but none of the default file systems actually protect against it, or even detect when it's happened.