Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:
ZFS is a local file system as far as I understand it. It's by Solaris but there are two efforts to port it to Linux, one through userspace via Fuse and the other through kernel. It seems like the Fuse approach is more matured and at the moment slightly more desirable from my POV because no messing around with kernel/recompile needed.
I thought the GPL on the kernel code would not permit the inclusion of less restricted code like the CDL-covered zfs. For a network share, why not use the OpenSolaris or NexentaStor versions since you wouldn't be using much else from the system anyway.
The main thing for me is that ZFS comes with inode/sector ECC functionality so that would catch "soft" hardware errors such as a flaky data cable that's silently corrupting data without any immediately observable effect.
It also has RAID functionality but I've seen various reports of failed zpool that couldn't be easily recovered. So my most likely configuration is to configure glusterfs on top of zfs (for the ECC) on top of mdraid 1 (for redundancy and ease of recovery)
Snapshots and block-level de-dup are other features of zfs - but I think you'll lose that if you wrap anything else over it. Maybe you could overcommit an iscsi export expecting the de-dup to make up the size difference and use that as a block level component of something else.