Now where do we go?

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Now where do we go?

Post by ylluminate » Fri May 17, 2013 12:20 pm

Now with Don pretty much out of the picture for Greenbytes, where do we go now? I have not seen a desperately needed update in many months. I used to work closely with Don on a number of bugs that we'd hoped to resolve soon long ago at this point. Last I understood was that things were being brought inline with standard dev trunks, but at this point I'm left to believe that things are pretty much dead with Zevo.

I notice a bit of activity going on with zfs-osx (https://github.com/zfs-osx) and have heard about the efforts to port the Linux port over, but... Zevo really used to be the best option before this dearth of updates. Perhaps it still is, but performance and various issues are still driving me insane. I am close to moving over to SoftRAID and just using ZFS on a NAS as I used to. I don't want to do this, but I'm not seeing any light at the end of this proverbial tunnel now.

Please help those of us who have been long time testers, advocates and developers to understand what to do and where to go at this fork, else we'll be left to choose for ourselves without any additional light from you to cast off the very dark shadows of doubt.
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by grahamperrin » Sat May 18, 2013 2:02 pm

ylluminate wrote:… used to be the best option …


I reckon that for ZFS on OS X, ZEVO Community Edition 1.1.1 remains the best option.

For an alternative implementation to provide both (a) a matching feature set, and (b) the levels of stability that I have learnt to expect: I can't guess a timescale.
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by ghaskins » Tue May 21, 2013 7:41 am

ylluminate wrote:Now with Don pretty much out of the picture for Greenbytes


What did I miss? Did Don leave the company or something? I've been away from the forum for a while, but search does not reveal anything insightful on the matter.

Kind Regards,
-Greg
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by monkeyfoahead » Thu May 23, 2013 3:52 pm

I too am concerned. With the inevitable release of 10.9, ZEVO will undoubtably break. Will someone fix it when it does? Where else should I migrate too if ZEVO is dead? :(
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by grahamperrin » Sat May 25, 2013 6:29 am

monkeyfoahead wrote:… 10.9, ZEVO will undoubtably break. …


Have you any evidence to support that claim?
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by satadru » Sat May 25, 2013 1:15 pm

ghaskins wrote:
ylluminate wrote:Now with Don pretty much out of the picture for Greenbytes


What did I miss? Did Don leave the company or something? I've been away from the forum for a while, but search does not reveal anything insightful on the matter.

Kind Regards,
-Greg


Second on this. I haven't heard anything about Don leaving, but if it is true, and zfs for OS X is no longer a priority for GreenBytes, then I need to have contingency plans in place for migrating off of zevo in the next 12 months when I have hardware/software no longer supported by zevo.

There's always FreeNAS for continued ZFS support, and btrfs seems to be rapidly coalescing into a usable product if I switch to Linux, and it does also have data checksumming to notice bitrot.

Is Don gone?
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by monkeyfoahead » Sun May 26, 2013 2:11 pm

grahamperrin wrote:
monkeyfoahead wrote:… 10.9, ZEVO will undoubtably break. …


Have you any evidence to support that claim?


SIgh. I was using 10.9 as an example. It is likely that as time passes and Apple updates their OS, Zevo will break. I do not need to clarify this, this phenomena is well known. If no one is maintaining, Zevo dies.
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by ilovezfs » Tue May 28, 2013 10:24 am

satadru wrote:There's always FreeNAS for continued ZFS support, and btrfs seems to be rapidly coalescing into a usable product if I switch to Linux, and it does also have data checksumming to notice bitrot.

You could continue using OS X for your primary machine, but put your files on a Linux server using Btrfs (or alternatively ZFS on Linux http://zfsonlinux.org). Netatalk on Linux works really well for sharing files to Macs over AFP with support for extended attributes, etc. The development branch of the git version of Netatalk even supports server-side Spotlight search! If you only want to use Macs, the Linux server could simply be a virtual machine on another Mac using USB 3.0 passthrough. In fact you could just have the VM on your primary Mac depending on whether battery life is an issue.

Netatalk also works great on Oracle Solaris 11 (dedup and encryption) and Open Indiana. You'd probably want to run these on bare metal because USB 3.0 passthrough is less likely to work in a virtual machine. Directly attached SATA drives would be the way to go. There are several online guides to building your own Solaris server. Or you could just buy one of the 3rd party (Dell, HP, whatever) on Oracle's Hardware Compatibility List for Oracle Solaris 11. http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technet ... index.html

Unfortunately, if you keep your files on a server, your data transfer rate to your primary machine will be capped at gigabit Ethernet speeds, unless you invest in 10GbE equipment which is expensive but super cool.

ZEVO lets you surpass gigabit Ethernet speed AND have checksumming AND use a Mac AND not have to buy 10GbE equipment AND not have to spend a significant part of your life dealing with Linux headaches.

You might also want to look into Microsoft's ReFS (yeah, I know...hush), which is the brand new filesystem for Windows Server 2012. There will certainly be Mac drivers for it at some point in the next few years once it makes the hop over to Windows 9 (or whatever). ReFS supports checksumming, mirroring, and parity. And you have a $290 billion company actively investing in it. A significant portion of the code was taken from NTFS and Microsoft is being conservative adding few bells and whistles to it for the time being, so I wouldn't worry about reliability due to its newness.

And of course Apple could surprise all of us and come out with their own modern filesystem sometime soon. *not holding breath*
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by GregB » Wed May 29, 2013 7:51 am

ZEVO does/may continue to cut costs by providing a solid data storage system without additional hardware purchases. On the other hand, I have been considering the advantages of a dedicated storage appliance. A dedicated appliance allows one to run whatever OS one wants: FreeNAS, Linux, Windows. These all have much support. Once it works, you don't have to upgrade it, etc.

Many people seem to be happy with a low power HP microserver: $250-$350, up to 8-16 GB ECC ram, 4 disk slots (although some cram 6 disks in), low noise. Too bad 10G ethernet is so expensive; however with a mac pro one can probably get link aggregation working for a 2 Gbps path, which isn't bad for hard disks. Or there are thunderbolt <> 10G etherenet products.
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by monkeyfoahead » Wed May 29, 2013 7:01 pm

ilovezfs wrote:
satadru wrote:There's always FreeNAS for continued ZFS support, and btrfs seems to be rapidly coalescing into a usable product if I switch to Linux, and it does also have data checksumming to notice bitrot.

You could continue using OS X for your primary machine, but put your files on a Linux server using Btrfs (or alternatively ZFS on Linux http://zfsonlinux.org). Netatalk on Linux works really well for sharing files to Macs over AFP with support for extended attributes, etc. The development branch of the git version of Netatalk even supports server-side Spotlight search! If you only want to use Macs, the Linux server could simply be a virtual machine on another Mac using USB 3.0 passthrough. In fact you could just have the VM on your primary Mac depending on whether battery life is an issue.

Netatalk also works great on Oracle Solaris 11 (dedup and encryption) and Open Indiana. You'd probably want to run these on bare metal because USB 3.0 passthrough is less likely to work in a virtual machine. Directly attached SATA drives would be the way to go. There are several online guides to building your own Solaris server. Or you could just buy one of the 3rd party (Dell, HP, whatever) on Oracle's Hardware Compatibility List for Oracle Solaris 11. http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technet ... index.html

Unfortunately, if you keep your files on a server, your data transfer rate to your primary machine will be capped at gigabit Ethernet speeds, unless you invest in 10GbE equipment which is expensive but super cool.

ZEVO lets you surpass gigabit Ethernet speed AND have checksumming AND use a Mac AND not have to buy 10GbE equipment AND not have to spend a significant part of your life dealing with Linux headaches.

You might also want to look into Microsoft's ReFS (yeah, I know...hush), which is the brand new filesystem for Windows Server 2012. There will certainly be Mac drivers for it at some point in the next few years once it makes the hop over to Windows 9 (or whatever). ReFS supports checksumming, mirroring, and parity. And you have a $290 billion company actively investing in it. A significant portion of the code was taken from NTFS and Microsoft is being conservative adding few bells and whistles to it for the time being, so I wouldn't worry about reliability due to its newness.

And of course Apple could surprise all of us and come out with their own modern filesystem sometime soon. *not holding breath*


I own a Mac Pro modified to accept 8 sata harddrives that I have in a single zpool. If Zevo bites the dust, will I be able to run some kind of VM solution from within OSX to access this zpool? Please pardon my ignorance.
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