
GPFS versus ZFS
When we, as an education-related department, needed new storage some years ago we were sick and tired of basic hardware RAID rebuilds failing due to bad blocks found only when one disk died and a rebuild was forced. Not only were there block errors, but finding out *what* file (if any) was now corrupted was an absolute pain.
So when it came to tendering for new storage we had a requirement for file-level integrity checks which, at the time, really meant it was down to Sun's ZFS or IBM's GPFS file systems running on something (TBD by offering company).
Sadly for us, being funded the way we are, GPFS was a no-go as it had an ongoing license fee irrespective of support, and that is something we could not take. Also we were bid with something like 5 days on-site time to get it running.
Seriously? If it is that difficult for IBM's experts what hope in Hell do we have to manage it later on?
So we went with Sun and while ZFS works very well, the whole appliance thing they built to make it a system sucks donkey balls. Now it is Oracle and support is even poorer and much more expensive, we want out and our replacement storage system is likely to be self-built.
Yes, we won't have any SLA or someone to blame if it goes wrong, but on the other hand we will be able to do *something* rather than waste days of effort chasing up Oracle, etc, to see if decides if they can be bothered to actually do something to fix it.