Dedupe, dedupe... dedupe, dedupe, dedupe: Oracle polishes ZFS diamond

Oracle's ZFS is widely lauded as a great file system even though several suppliers that use it for their own products have replaced its deduplication code with their own. One such was GreenBytes, a startup which developed an all-flash array for virtualised servers and focused on VDI. It switched to a software-only model after …

[ahl]

That should please other ZFS users...

Chris, I think you're confused about how Oracle's ZFS works. They don't contribute to open source which is why OpenZFS was created. Other companies building on ZFS have nothing to do with Oracle and haven't since 2010.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: That should please other ZFS users...

Indeed, Oracle (closed source) ZFS can't use any of the technical debt payback, fixes and enterprise enhancements which the Illuminos technologies contributors have added for real enterprise needs; I've noticed some of these useful enhancements in my FreeNAS boxes.

[Alasdairrr]

"That should please other ZFS users"

Nope, I'm afraid not. Oracle closed-source Solaris and by extension ZFS. Their improvements to ZFS are only for their own commercial Solaris 11 operating system.

OpenZFS, the fork used by Delphix, Nexenta, Joyent et all, won't be seeing any Oracle ZFS improvements. And vice versa.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wont Oracle take some of the improvements from OpenZFS and incorporate it into their version with no one the wiser this was done. I thought that was happening all along. Maybe I am wrong. Are there licensing restrictions?

Was greenbytes' dedupe innovation open source?

[MadMike]

Exchangeable

As long as you stay on ZFS version 28 you can freely switch operating systems between Oracle Solaris and others: Mac OS X, Linux, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, etc.

Oracle ZFS and OpenZFS diverge after v28. So make sure you do not upgrade ZFS beyond v28 if you want to freely switch OS and avoid vendor lockin. I dont think Oracle ZFS dedupe force you to upgrade zfs beyond v28, which means you could switch OS to Oracle Solaris and make use of heavy dedupe. If it doesnt please you, you just switch back to another OS.