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Apple Removes Nearly All Reference To ZFS
Roskolnikov writes "Apple has apparently decided that ZFS isn't really ready for prime time. We've been discussing Apple/ZFS rumors, denials, and sightings for some years now. Currently a search on Apple's site for ZFS yields only two hits, one of them probably an oversight in the ZFS-cleansing program and the other a reference to open source. Contrast this with an item from the Google cache regarding ZFS and Snow Leopard. Apple has done this kind of disappearing act in the past, but I was really hoping that this was one feature promise they would keep. I certainly hope this isn't the first foot in the grave for ZFS on OS X."
Could this be a Larry effect?
With most of the emphasis on performance and stability, this was probably the one "feature" I was looking forward to with Snow Leopard. At $29 I'll still upgrade. Grand Central and OpenCL sound fairly impressive but I was really looking forward to a file system that never needed to be upgraded... I guess I'll keep on waiting.
Gotta get me one of these!
At my workplace we migrated to a brand new sun NFS server with ZFS and hit a critical bug in the first two weeks. If Sun can't get it right I don't expect others to.
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I mean, lets be honest no one really uses OSX Server for anything really mission critical that relies on it for the kind of storage capabilities ZFS would provide. Do they? Feel free to correct me with real world usage senarios of OSX Server ( I haven't heard of much).
I guess XSans may use it. I don't know much about them to be honest, another department at work has a small one for FCP editing. Seems to me that it's the same as any old san.
More like the last nail in the coffin . . .
Which is what I hope. Having tried forth and back over the last years, trying to convince myself, that it would fulfill its promises (and it promises a lot! and all beautiful things) one day or another.
It simply didn't. Which is a shame, since if it did, ZFS would be last file system mankind would have ever needed.
But even in 2009, it suffers from serious problems, just read the ZFS list in OpenSolaris. Basic things, that is.
Like boot corruption; like unusable system, if you pull the power, and pull the power again while it is restarting; Like slowness under specific conditions; like rendering the file system unbootable, reproducibly, when using a specific setup of snapshots.
The latter, not addressed on the mailing list, killed our interest immediately.
Not to forget some arrogance of the Sun engineers when it turned out that you cannot simply unplug a USB-drive. And it won't be enough, to umount it, neither. If you want the data to be there, sure, after the removal, you have to export the drive. Now tell this to Aunt Tilly. Or me, when I stumble over a USB-cable and out it is. And my data, as confirmed on the mailing list, potentially gone forever; with, confirmed, no tool available for recovery.
My last hope for it, had been that the engineers at Apple were able to give it the life-line needed to provide reliable Time-Machines (the snapshots of ZFS are just perfect therefore), but obviously, they have given up just as well.
I bet that something like ZFS will resurrect, one day or another. It simply has to. But ZFS as of today is more like Leonardo's drawings of a copter, compared to an Apache.
What ZFS does have that typical Apple Consumers would like to see it on desktops and not just on servers?
Almost every ZFS oriented discussion, there just comes one point up. ZFS is not miracle what is not possible to gain already with other kind setup with RAID and other filesystem.
Afaik Btrfs, which is roughly the Linux version of ZFS, has been started by Oracle (developers) and then embraced by Red Hat and alikes. So I'm wondering what are Oracle's plans about Btrfs after acquiring ZFS through Sun?
I'm in the same boat. For years I've been looking for a file system can hold files larger than 2GB and can be mounted from Windows and Mac OS X (and maybe Linux). That would allow me to store all my work on one partition, and access it from Mac OS X, from Windows via Boot Camp, or from Windows inside Parallels or VMware Fusion. It would also allow me to transfer large files back and forth between my Mac and other Windows computers. I was hoping ZFS would be that file system.
The last time I checked (the middle of 2008), the only way to do this was via NTFS, and the only read-write support for NTFS on OSX was the MacFUSE NTFS driver, which was pretty slow.
I just saw that MacDrive 7.2 now allows Windows Vista x64 (my Boot Camp OS) to read HFS disks, so maybe I'll give that a try. There are also rumors that Snow Leopard's Boot Camp utility will include drivers for Windows to read HFS disks, so maybe that will help too.
In 2006 I was given a MacBook Pro to work with... it had been over 10 years since I computed on the fruity side and I decided to trust that Apple had "done the right things" with the features they included. One feature of interest was their "FileVault" which gave a "here, try this:" howto on encrypting your home directory. I thought with all the "just works" hype that surely Apple would have made such a thing secure and reliable... it wasn't 2 weeks before my MacBook Pro was useless, had to re-install OS-X from DVD, as confirmed by an Apple Tech support guy who actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about... see, in 2006 the MacBook Pro wouldn't always shut down cleanly, so a hard power-off was required every couple of days... this hard power off glitched the FileVault, rendering everything in it (my one and only home directory on the system), inaccessible, and therefore the system unbootable past the login prompt.
Lessons learned:
Even today, encrypting files necessary to boot the system is a bad idea - the promises of ZFS would cure this, but only if they are true.
Always create a back-up account, or three, so you don't have to brain-wipe the system when your primary account goes dead (which mine never has since then, of course it is also not encrypted anymore).
"Just Works" is fanboi speak for "I really like my shiny computer and I'll say anything to make you think it's better than yours.", OS-X is on-par with other modern OSs in terms of reliability and usability, at least in my experience of the last 3 years, they (OS-X, Vista, ubuntu) each have strengths and weaknesses, but overall, OS-X isn't a shining star in any area that matters to me.
If ZFS were "ready for prime time" I expect that it would be in ubuntu already. If I were in corporate cost cutting strategy at Apple development, I'd say "let the Linux world sort that one out" and pick it back up if/when it is ready for prime time. Because, if Apple sorts it out on their own nickel, they'll only have the geek-head advantage for a little less than a year before useful ZFS is picked up by the Linux world, and I doubt that one year of geek-head advantage translates into enough extra shiny boxes sold to cover the (apparently high and growing) cost of ZFS development.
Well, I've been using ZFS for several years on several different machines with mixes of mirrored and RAID-Z configurations. Since that time, I've never lost one bit of data. It has survived power-supply failures, lightning strikes that fried the motherboard, flaky I/O cards, and human error. I understand that the implementation on Mac OS/X may be buggy, but it's not inherent to ZFS. I've several Macs doing time-machine to networked ZFS drives. It's definitely the filesystem I'd like to have everywhere.
Even if you have a 100% bugfree drive firmware, silent data corruption is still possible (resilience against silent data corruption is one of ZFS's selling points!). Filesystems that can't handle that simply have no place in todays world. The problem is that one flipped bit can cause ZFS to think that the whole pool is unusable - even though it keeps redundant copies of the metadata which it then completely ignores! What for does it keep the copies then?
Who'da thought that most of the world has bad hardware?
Sun oversold ZFS. Then when it fails, they blame the hardware. It's never their fault, they're too perfect. That is exactly why they got bought by a software company.
It's a widely known fact that Apple uses Mac OS X Server to host the iTunes Music Store. No, I'm not going to provide you with a link. Learn to use Google.
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I think NFS is a good alternative to AFP. I use it at my Mac shop, and it works really well once you figure out the automounter tricks, which in short is, on Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 the automounter works oddly much better if you use 'net' and let it pick where to mount the share.
Once you get that worked out, Macs get along quite nicely with standard NFS servers which gives you a huge complicated market from which to draw.
There are some huge high-performance vendors in this space too like Bluearc and Isilon, and in addition to the already pretty intimidating (separate data/metadata cluster) NFS to SamFS/QFS gateway above, Sun is working aggressively (albeit slowly) on a new generation of cluster-backed (high-availability and not-limited-to-the-bandwidth-of-a-single-CPU) NFS stuff like pNFS, and NFS-to-Lustre gateways. It is not a mistake to make a commitment to NFS.
it'd be nice, though, if Apple would push all their netboot, LDAP, and software update cache tools as open source packages and get them integrated into CentOS or Ubuntu, the way they did with CUPS which works amazingly well. It's like they think they're doing some Microsoft Small Business Server thing with OS X Server, and it's just not on.