jeffr_tech's Journal

http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/

Netapp is suing sun for what seems to be blatant patent infringement in ZFS. WAFL, Netapp's filesystem uses a novel method for consistency using checkpoints that sun directly copied. Allegedly, this was instigated by sun trying to collect royalties on other patents. If this is true, I'm glad it's biting them now. You can't position yourself as an open and friendly player and then start suing companies to generate revenue. Especially when your hands are dirty too.

I was actually a little surprised that sun decided to use WAFL's COW check-pointing system to implement ZFS. It's a great idea but requires a lot of extra metadata writes compared to a traditional filesystem. I believe netapp uses a nvram to store the block allocation bitmaps to eliminate the extra cost of the io associated with this scheme. However, sun is using it on normal disks so they're just sucking up the extra IOs.

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