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NetApp Threatens Sellers of Appliances Running ZFS
eldavojohn writes "ZFS is licensed under the CDDL and is considered to be open source, but NetApp is sending threatening legal letters to startups who look to offer ZFS on NAS appliances. This assault on Coraid has a few people worried about the future of ZFS as NetApp rears its ugly head yet again. The CEO of Coraid replied to NetApp's demands, saying, 'We made the decision to suspend shipment after receiving a legal threat letter from NetApp Inc., suggesting that the open-source ZFS file system planned for inclusion with our EtherDrive Z-Series infringes NetApp patents.' Will NetApp effectively destroy any future ZFS might have enjoyed?"
They have a patent on this technology. They deserve the right to not have compete against their own technology. End of story. You can bitch and moan over whether or not patents are fair, but that's not the issue. The issue is that as of this moment, they have a legal patent and they spent years investing and developing their snapshot technology.
Netapp for what it's worth is a decent company, I don't think they would just go out and start a patent war for no reason. I fully support them over Sun and ZFS on this one.
Out of curiosity what do you find so difficult about working with NetApp hardware?
SnapMirror leaves some things to be desired, monitoring is a PITA, their web interface is CRAP, I even prefer Navisphere for friendliness. Primary deduplication is a joke, despite how many times their engineers told us "that shouldn't be possible" as we demonstrated bringing a test filer to it's knees / crashing it outright as we dealt with 1tb volumes that stored a bunch of SQL dumps that were a joke to dedupe being so similar. iSCSI performance is a joke (WAFL is great if you run a NAS, but they play in the SAN space, and WAFL really isn't helping NetApp pretend to be a block level storage provider.