[Discuss] ZFS

[david3d at gmail.com (David Miller)]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 10:47 PM, Edward Ned Harvey <blu at nedharvey.com>wrote:

> ZFS is part of solaris.  Yes it's closed source now.
>
> Open source is great for a lot of situations, but certainly not all.
>  Here's
> what happened with ZFS:  They open-sourced it.  The community didn't
> contribute.  They spun off free alternatives and poo-poo'd the upstream
> provider.  They got sued and lost, because netapp was able to see the
> innards of what they were doing and how they were doing it.  Now they
> close-sourced it again.  If you want ZFS, you must either pay snoracle, or
> go use one of the forks which have not received significant development
> effort in approx 1 year.  If you do go use one of the forks, be aware the
> only reason those providers (nexenta, freebsd, illumos, etc) are not
> getting
> sued is because netapp doesn't consider them a serious threat / not worth
> while to sue.  Albeit very unlikely, it's conceivable that even consumers
> could get sued.  Not just the provider.
>
> The ironic thing is...  Because snoracle lost the ZFS COW lawsuit...  Well
> actually they settled.  Which means they paid undisclosed damages, but now
> they're immune to further lawsuit on that subject.  So essentially snoracle
> has a legal monopoly on ZFS distribution as well as the only (seriously)
> active development branch.
>
>
Oracle/Sun didn't loose or settle any case with NetApp.   There were counter
suits involved due to patents that Oracle/Sun held and the risks and costs
weren't worth continuing so both parties had the lawsuits dismissed without
prejudice.  Neither company really wanted to risk having a patent dismissed
so they would rather back down than loose their patents as they can still
easily go after smaller fish who aren't going to fight with those patents.
The only ZFS related case that was settled that I'm aware of was against
CoRaid.  And Netapp picked them b/c ZFS wasn't critical to their business so
they chose to settle rather than fight.  It's funny that NetApp picked
CoRaid who had barely shipped any ZFS storage when Nexenta has shipped 330PB
of ZFS based storage and would most definitely be a better target.  But this
case did give NetApp a drum to beat and continue to spread FUD.

Funny thing is at VMWorld Nexenta there was 3 storage vendors providing
storage for the VM labs.  EMC, NetApp, and Nexenta.  Nexenta actually shined
quite well at the show.  Their solution was well under half the cost and
when one of the other vendors had problems the VMs were migrated over to
Nexenta and the solution was able to hold over 60% of the VMs in the labs at
one point.  They even had a DIMM fail in one of the head units and the HA
handled that situation without a hiccup.  If I were NetApp I'd be worried
about companies like Nexenta turning the storage market into a commodity
market.

That said unless you have an agreement that gives you indemnity then you
would be in a position where you could be liable for any licensing and
damages should someone choose to exercise their rights to their patents.
Right now the only place to have that assurance is from Oracle.
--
David