ZFSSA/S7000 major update

The first major software update of S7000/ZFSSA/Fishwork in over a year is now available. With the original version "2011.Q1" it seems a bit delayed, perhaps due to the departure several key persons behind the software post Oracle acquisition of Sun. New features in this release:

• ZFS RAIDZ read performance improvements
• Significant fairness improvements during ZFS resilver operations
• Significant zpool import speed improvements
• Replication enhancements - including self-replication
• Seval more including bug fixes.

There are alsoa few integration features for Oracle including RMAN and Infiniband if you happen to have a Exadata around.

The improved RAIDZ performances is the hybrid raidz/mirror allocator in zpool version 29.

The ZFSSA is a fantastic product with probably the best interface and analytics available. But the development seems to have stagnated a bit the last year, so have the blog post with useful information and performance comparison by the people behind it. And I still miss one feature badly; synchronous replication of datasets, continuous replication is not always good enough.

Release Notes