Nexenta Core Platform 3.1

Nexenta is about to release version 3.1 of NCP (Nexenta Core Platform), existing installations can already be upgraded but there are no install images available yet. NCP 3.1 is used as the foundation for NexentaStor 3.1, Nexentas latest release of their software storage appliance.

The new 3.1 version is still based on a patched OpenSolaris 134 codebase, changes in this released include an updated ZFS pool version (28), write same/unmap support and probably many bug fixes.

The 4.0 release of NCP which is currently under development will be based on illumos that contains many additional features.

NexentaStor 3.1 available now
nexenta.org

illumos news

There have been some news surrounding the illumos project, the community developed and maintained version of the OS/Net consolidation and future code base for Nexenta and OpenIndiana.

First Nexenta have hired three known developers from the OpenSolaris community. The development process have also been changed to become more scalable so that more developers can participate. This is done by having Advocates accepting and reviewing patches instead of giving commit access to all contributors:

"So now, rather than developers pushing changes directly to our mercurial tree, going forward Advocates will take patches from Contributors (either via hg export or patch file), verify that the content of the patch is what was reviewed, and will then be responsible for integrating those changes into our shared master."

It's encouraging to see that two of the three persons behind DTrace is active in the illumos project, Bryan Cantrill posted this to illumos-devel a few days ago:

"For whatever it's worth, I have some DTrace patches and some user-land SMF patches to send to whomever is most appropriate. (Both of these add new features, FWIW.)"

Welcome to new Nexentians
Change to illumos contribution process

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

1. No support from sponsoring project or company, may be available elsewhere.

Nexenta OpenStorage summit

Next week Nexenta will be hosting it's first annual OpenStorage summit in Palo Alto, CA. Besides obvious speakers such as Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta several people from the ZFS/OpenSolaris community will also be speaking:

Bill Moore, Ex-Sun ZFS Co-creator
Jeff Bonwick, Ex-Sun creator of ZFS
Ben Rockwood, director of systems at Joyent.

Nexenta is as you probably know an OpenStorage vendor which builds it's storage appliance on top of ZFS. They are probably part of the reason Oracle cut the cord on the OpenSolaris source since their product competed with Oracles own OpenStorage appliances, which also are built on ZFS. Nexenta plans to continue to develop the ZFS/OpenSolais source and are sponsors of the illumos project which is the de-facto development gate of the OpenSolaris source now.

It will be interesting to see how they plan to handle the fork of ZFS now that Oracle have continued their development internally, ZFS have gained bug fixes but more importantly new features in newer versions of the on-disk format. If Nexenta plans to enhance ZFS to a degree that requires new version of the pool the two implementations will no longer be compatible.

Nexenta will fall behind Oracle Solaris/Oracle OpenStorage in terms of ZFS features, at least for a while. Oracle has plenty of source already created for ZFS which is yet to be integrated in their Solaris Next source, one of them is the BP rewrite project which has been in the making for years, another is ZFS on-disk encryption which has already been integrated into the internal Solaris gate at Oracle

Will Nexenta sit out and hope for the ZFS source to be released after Solaris 11 (late next year at the earliest) or will the make larger enhancements by their own. Both scenarios are possible while i doubt Nexenta will sit and await for Oracle. The ZFS code already released is stable and contains features not yet integrated into Nexenta products. New development is also possible, especially since several key persons behind ZFS have left Oracle and there are other developers, especially with a company found the development.

In the end this will affect all users of ZFS which are not Oracle customers, Nexenta and illumos are probably where future free ZFS development will be done. All users who want's a free OS with the latest possible ZFS bits are going to be using Nexenta Core or OpenIndiana or some other distribution based on the illumos source.

Nexenta announces first summit
Nexenta announces final agenda and sponsors for its first annual OpenStorage summit