Re: ZFS is the right choice for a server system
"If you are running an abstraction layer over your storage (such as a RAID controller, as many people do),"
Then you are not using ZFS as instructed - but that hasn't stopped a number of vendors selling expensive "ZFS servers" which have hardware RAID arrays in them and end up in various states of borkage under high load, especially coupled with the tendency to skimp on memory and cache drives.
ZFS is _NOT_ a filesystem.
ZFS is: An individual disk management system, a RAID manager with up to 3 stripe parity, a volume manager and a filesystem manager all rolled into one (and more).
Bitter experience has shown that £2k RAID array controllers or £40k FC disk arrays all have severe limitations on their performance. Our old FC disk arrays handle 1/10 the IOPS of the same spindle count running on a ZFS system and that's down to both the inability of the onboard controllers to keep up, the pitiful amount of write cache they offer and their inability to prevent writes seeking all over the platters.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
