The superficial versus deep appeal of ZFS

June 4, 2018

Red Hat recently announced Stratis (for a suitable value of 'recently'). In their articles introducing it, Red Hat says explicitly that they looked at ZFS, among other similar things, and implies that they did their best to take the appealing bits from ZFS. So what are Stratis's priorities? Let's quote:

Stratis aims to make three things easier: initial configuration of storage; making later changes; and using advanced storage features like snapshots, thin provisioning, and even tiering.

If you look at ZFS, it's clear where Stratis draws inspiration from both ZFS features and ZFS limitations. But it's also clear what the Stratis people see as ZFS's appeals (especially in their part 2); I would summarize these as flexible storage management (where you have a pool of storage that can be flexibly used by filesystems) and good command line tools.

These are good appeals of ZFS, make no mistake. I like them myself, and chafe when I wind up dealing with less flexible and more cumbersome storage management via LVM. But as someone who's used ZFS for years, it's also my opinion that they are superficial appeals of ZFS. They're the obvious things that you notice right away when you start using ZFS, and for good reason; it's very liberating to not have to pre-assign space to filesystems and so on.

(Casually making a snapshot before some potentially breaking change like switching Firefox versions and then being able to retrieve files from the snapshot in order to revert is also a cool trick.)

However, the longer I've used it the more I've come to see the deep appeal of ZFS as its checksums and how these are deeply integrated into its RAID layer to enable things like self-healing (such deep integration is required for this). You generally can't see this appeal right away, when you just set up and use ZFS. Instead you have to use ZFS for a while, through scrubs, disks that develop problems, and perhaps ZFS noticing and repairing damage to your pool without losing any data. This reassurance that your data is intact and repairable is something I've come to really treasure in ZFS and why I don't want to use anything without checksums any more.

On the whole, Stratis (or at least the articles about it) provides an interesting mirror on how people see ZFS and how that's different from my view of ZFS. Probably there are lessons for how people view many technologies, and certainly I've experienced this sort of split in other contexts.

Written on 04 June 2018.
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Last modified: Mon Jun 4 23:11:51 2018
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