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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?"
We need a site to organise boycotts of companies that abuse the patent, trademark, or copyright system. Not everyone would need to sign on to all of them, but anyone should be able to post a call and explain their reasoning. If we got enough techies onto it who would use it at work, it could have some muscle.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
See the second post in the recent thread on zfs-discuss: Legality and the future of zfs...
It doesn't sound as if Netapp has a leg to stand on, so they are trying to shake down the companies while they can. Where have we seen this before?
The Wikipedia article on NetApp talks about them bringing a suit against Sun/ZFS and that Sun countersued, but doesn't mention the verdict.
Read all about it (the story so far, as presented by Sun/Oracle): http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs, which provides links to a number of legal documents and patents and rulings from the PTO.
Basically, the patent which was central to NetApp's claim of infringement was found not to apply to ZFS. A second patent asserted to be infringed was rejected on reexamination by the PTO, but NetApp is still squirming through the appeals process. The current round of threats could be NetApp's last gasp/whimper on the topic.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
ZFS is a game changer in the storage industry. While people are buying $250,000 NetApp installations, the exact same hardware, performance and connectivity will go for $5000 of high-end hardware and a couple of hours work with ZFS. $250,000 will easily buy you a Petabyte worth of redundant ZFS storage. Even the reasons you would otherwise buy NetApp or another proprietary storage solution (compression, de-duplication, checksums) is all implemented by ZFS.
NetApp recently lost their patents based on prior art (they basically ripped off somebody's paper and put in a patent for it), appealed it of course and now they are trying to squeeze the last money out of small shops before they get the smack down from the patent office. This is a very similar case to the Caldera/SCO cases.
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NetApp built it's bussiness being a vendor of NAS systems that had extensible file systems that spanned clever raid structures, and automatic snapshoting and they did this long before ZFS. Those are the key features of ZFS.
VMS did it earlier. Screw NetApp and their overpriced, underfeatured, patented crap. Really. I mean that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I know you've already replied that you misunderstood, but just in case anyone else is confused by this...
This is a NAS, which is itself a server. Support for the filesystem is built into the NAS box. The NAS box then exposes the data it stores on that filesystem to the network using network-appropriate protocols.
Anyone wanting to access it would use a networking standard like Samba, Windows File Sharing, FTP, or whatever services the NAS box allows.
Of course, they'd also access the management tools (nowadays generally a small web server also built into the NAS box).
None of the clients would need to support the underlying filesystem that the NAS box uses. In fact, they wouldn't even be allowed to know what that filesystem is.
Back when I had Windows boxes at home, they had absolutely no problems reading shares I made on my Linux box. The Linux box could be formatted ext, Reiser, or anything I wanted that Linux supported.
As long as I never tried to take a hard drive out of the Linux box and put it in the Windows box, of course. Then it becomes local storage, and Windows would have to support the filesystem in order to read it.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Sorry buddy but the courts have ruled that ZFS doesn't infringe NetApp's patents. Read here and here. Cry more.
The case doesn't have merit because the courts have already ruled that ZFS doesn't infringe NetApp's patent No. 6,892,211 which is at the heart of their infringement claims. This is just a shakedown.
So the story goes, this dates back to some interns who worked at NetApp and then went to Sun and perhaps influenced ZFS.
The technology in WAFL is that of a pointer-based filesystem - which itself is pretty ingenious and is only now being feature-emulated (ZFS, BRTFS, etc).
One can say what they want of Netapp's pricing, but the technology is extremely solid and simple to operate compared to managing Linux or Solaris boxes running a filesystem as a NAS; the snapshots are without I/O penalty and you can take a lot of them, the clustering is *FAR* simpler than anything happening on general-purpose OSes, the support for protocols is industry-leading (FCoE, NFSv4, SMB 2.0 - they have a codeshare w/ Microsoft and do not use a reverse-engineered Samba implementation or run any kind of Windows storage server like competitors do).
ZFS has a lot of promise, but does not have nearly the performance that WAFL does (considering RAID-DP versus ZFS RAID6) and has only some of the feature set of mirroring, snapshot vaulting, filesystem and file cloning, WORM-compliance, etc. Companies don't want to bet their business on a science project of roll-your-own NAS which doesn't have the feature set the Netapps do, and no serious competitor (eg a company with the ability to financially stand behind the product) in the enterprise space has anything like the feature set.
I work for a systems integrator and I've messed with hundreds of Netapps, Sun and Linux appliances, and competitors over the years. I use ZFS at home because I can't afford a Netapp (and wouldn't want to pay the electricity bill if I could!) but if I ran an IT department I'd put my data on a Netapp FAS over a ZFS appliance any day.