As you can imagine, iXsystems is an excellent source of the right hardware for OpenZFS, but that too is something I invite you to verify on your own. You really want to get the right hardware but no artificial barriers stand in your way. Thanks to Illumos, FreeBSD and FreeNAS, no one is stopping you from building a petabyte of storage with whatever hardware you can afford. Drama is not something you want to associate with file systems or the hardware they run on. Both are just now accelerating from a trot to a gallop and I am very glad that they have been cautious and calculating. It is an honor to work with the OpenZFS community and iXsystems in particular who, thanks to FreeNAS, TrueNAS and TrueOS, has put OpenZFS in more hands than any other project or product on Earth.
Monocultures risk becoming vulnerable monopolies which is why virus writers target Microsoft Windows and we may face an “ Impending Crypto Monoculture“. This vote of no confidence from Red Hat leaves OpenZFS as the only proven Open Source data-validating enterprise file system and with that role comes great responsibility. SUSE continues to support Btrfs in only RAID 10 equivalent configurations, and only time will tell if bcachefs proves to be a compelling alternative to OpenZFS. I personally have invested my volunteer time and career in Open Source hypervisors and file systems and I am saddened to hear that a fledgling alternative to OpenZFS suffered a setback this week with Red Hat’s announcement that it is deprecating Btrfs as a “Preview” file system.
Name any category of software from complete operating systems on up and you have a plethora of choices with drastically-different philosophies, licenses, countries of origin, programming languages, and user experiences. Beyond the balance of freedom and control that Open Source provides, the sheer choice found in the Open Source ecosystem is one of its greatest strengths. I don’t know who said it first but hats off to them: “The only thing worse than competition is no competition.” This adage applies equally to market making where no competition can mean no customers, and to monopolies and monocultures. Our Senior Analyst’s take on this week’s Btrfs news from Red Hat