This post on Is ZFS ready for primetime? is disconcerting. I’ve put a lot of effort recently in engineering a zfs based storage server to backend a xen cluster. I haven’t put much up here and a back injury has restricted the amount of seat time. Without much tuning I’ve put together a TB+ system that provides 85Mb/s over NFS to a RAIDZ2 pool.
Throughout the whole period it has been a constant struggle to get Opensolaris working, figure out ancient Solaris ideas about system management. Sort out a kernel bug that caused crashes when running bonnie++.
Being held ransom by the idea of needing a Sun support contract at some future unknown date due to a bug in zfs seems to me as a losing position. Being forced into that position I think misses the point of opensource. Zfs provides striking advantages with checksums and simple snapshots, easy offline remote replication. But without the idea that your data is safe there is no point.
I can put together a Linux storage system without thinking and manage it without much thought. The lack of constant time snapshots is going to hurt, but at least I know the exact same system will still work in 2 years without any changes.