NetApp Threatens Sellers of Appliances Running ZFS

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 9, 2010 @06:51AM from the they-also-invented-the-box-and-the-bucket dept.

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?"

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Re:NetApp by sglewis100 · 2010-07-09 11:14 · Score: 1, Troll

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.