ZFS Feature/Dist table

For a advanced, low cost, data consistent storage server ZFS still has very little competition. The main challenge today is to choose the correct distribution for your needs. We have S7000/Fishworks and NexentaStor, but both are appliances and cost a fair bit of money, at lest for anything but trivial deployments (>18TB). I put together a table with ZFS features, storage features and cost/support status, included are the larger distributions with Solaris/OpenSolaris kernel today, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris 2009.06 as a reference.

It's not much of a surprise that Solaris 11 Express comes out with the most complete feature set, but it also has a cost of $1000/year for up to 8 cores (1 socket, non Oracle HW) for anything but testing and development. That is cheap for a file server with all the features ZFS provides but for home filers it can be a bit too much.

This table is of course subject to change. Both Nexenta and FreeBSD will surly continue to update ZFS at least to the point were Oracle stopped releasing the source. The available source from Oracle does not include some of the features in the table, for example ZFS crypto and probably a fair amount of bug fixes.

Release	S11 Exp	NCP	FreeBSD	OSOL
Free for use in production	N	Y	Y	Y
Commercial support available	Y	N1	N1	N1
Zpool version	31	26	14	14
ZFS Diff	Y	N	N	N
RAID-Z/mirror hybrid allocator	Y	N	N	N
Improved 'zfs list' performance	Y	N	N	N
Encryption	Y	N	N	N
Multiple vdev replacements	Y	N	N	N
zdb w decomp, checksum, raidz	Y	N	N	N
Low priority resilver	Y	N	N	N
Deduplication	Y	Y	N	N
Tripple-parity raidz	Y	Y	N	N
Log device removal	Y	Y	N	N
Improved scrub stats	Y	Y	N	N
Improved snapshot deleteion performance	Y	Y	N	N
zpool recover	Y	Y	N	N
resilver prefetch	Y	Y	N	N
zpool split	Y	Y	N	N
zil synchronicity	Y	Y	N	N
ZIL	Y	Y	Y	Y
L2ARC	Y	Y	Y	Y
Checksum	Y	Y	Y	Y
Snapshot	Y	Y	Y	Y
Clones	Y	Y	Y	Y
COMSTAR	Y	Y	N	Y
In kernel CIFS/SMB	Y	Y	N	Y

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