Sun (alledgedly) stole WAFL from NetApp, how long will it take for them to pinch their provisioning software too?

In the meantime, Red Hat and SuSE carry on chucking out solutions ready to go with Samba, tried and tested software that has been around even longer than Sun's mascot (it even runs on Solaris!).

When I tried to research this area a few months back, I relied on some Sun bloggers posts to help me learn enough about ZFS to set up a NAS, so it's good to see Sun publishing something like an "all in one" guide today.

My "from the trenches" write-up on this fascinating area can be perused here:

http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

Mine's a Schlitz, Ashlee :)

Oh, where's the beer icon -- can I request a beer glass icon be added?

Errr, not including the 20+ minutes to set up the hardware and 2+ hours to install Solaris.

And they end up with a huge power hungry machine that keeps the house cozy in winter.

The little NAS box under my desk took 5 minutes to set up (including screaming at the kids to bring back my bloody screwdrivers that they had stolen) and lives off the sniff of an electron and is more than adequate for a home server. It cost less than the 5G or RAM that they put in their machine to keep ZFS happy.

If you want to bond with your son then take him fishing.

Schlitz... I mean seriously dude, that stuff is /awful/. This explains much.

Can someone reveal the relevance of this articles title? Be gentle lol

P.S. Paris, coz she probably knows this answer!

we have some of suns kit here, the hardware was a cinch to install (it was rack mounted, easiest rack mounting i've ever seen) ... in fact if we hadn't watched our fingers we'd have probably lost them :)

We did reinstall the solaris to get the partitions the way we wanted (quite long, but less than an hour if you do a net install).

But if you're setting up ZFS, NFS and CIFS it takes no time at all, seriously, from raw disks to fully working in about 1 min, and most of that is deciding what you wanna call the partitions :)

I had one of those little NAS server. Although transfer speed was aweful, it worked/ Until one day there was a power cut and it won't come back up. The disk was fine, the hardware/firmware on the box has died forever. If you claim these small NAS boxes does anything more than just giving pitiful access to your shared files in your home lan, you are kidding yourself. The beauty of zfs is that is it gives access to utilities previously unavailable to consumers. Until you know what sort of things are possible in zfs, you will be in a mode of denial and keep arguing that you can do everything with Linux/SAMBA/Volmgr. Once you try zfs and play with pooled storage, snapshots, you can not live without it. I had set up a small NAS box myself with 4 disks with mirroring. Measured the power consumption, 85 Watts - still too large to keep powered on 24x7. It has only 1G memory and zfs runs just fine -transfers files much faster than the tiny small box. I have both nfs and cifs shares on this. Made many snapshots of my file systems, taking backup is easier than ever. I can go on why I can not go back to anything less, but you won't understand.

"....Once you try zfs and play with pooled storage, snapshots, you can not live without it...." Well, I've only played with the Slowaris version, but I have used the NetApp WAFL original, and it didn't stop me going back to building Linux-Samba fileservers for a fraction of the cost. Sun is so late to market, even M$ have had snapshotting and cloning and volume shadowing for a while with better support, better hardware options, and lower price. But then I tend to do my real storage on real SAN devices like EVAs, XPs, or Clariions, which have better features and real redundancy/resilience.

There the paid Sunbashing droid is back. You bet he is paid by HP for constant trashtalking Sun. He is a RICH consumer to pay for a WAFL homeserver too. And he can have pooled storage with volume management/snapshoting/cloning/compression all integrated with Linux/SAMBA - talk about talking with with the wrong side. The droid now even starts claiming trying solaris with zfs, did you hear that too !!

"....He is a RICH consumer to pay for a WAFL homeserver...." Read the article title, it explicitly mentions NetApp, and the article is about Sun trying to get a chunk of the NAS appliance market in the business space, not home consumer. Slowaris has zero chance of taking on the home consumer NAS appliances as they use very cheap chips and embedded Linux, whereas Slowaris and ZFS needs at least a x86-compliant solution and is therefore going to be more expensive. I use NAS and SAN arrays in the workplace, I use Linux and Windows at home, and I wouldn't consider Slowaris for either. Slowaris is a poor choice for business unless some dummy has selected a Solaris-only app, and then I'd be trying it out on top of Transitive long before I'd consider buying a Sun box; and why choose Slowaris for the home when Linux has a so much richer selection of offerings and community?

As for Slowaris and ZFS for NAS for work, even if it did have some advantage (and so far I have seen none), as a professional I'd be waiting for the outcome of the NetApp suit before installing anything with ZFS into a business environment.

Happy daydreams, Sunshiner!