FAQ zfs deduplication

Q. When will ZFS have deduplication?

A. Just my view on ZFS + deduplication based on what I know..

• There is some legal bla bla between Sun and green-bytes that's tying up the IP around dedup... (someone knock some sense into green-bytes please) 
• there's an acquisition that's got all sorts of delays.. which may very well delay the thing with green-bytes as well
• Is it in the best interest of Oracle for ZFS to have dedup before btrfs?  (I doubt this is a reason, but it's a question to ask)
• Nobody has written the code.. patches welcome :)

Drop me a comment if I'm missing something


IANAL


./C

Comments

[mcdtracy]

Here's another factor in Sun's silence on the issue.

Sun has a viable Storage product that is entirely based upon ZFS now: the 7000 Series Unified Storage.

Adding dedupe to ZFS will also flow through to the capability of ZFS being qualified and added to the 7000 Series Storage.

It is likely that the capabilities of ZFS in OpenSolaris have been silenced to take pressure off the "When will 7000 Series have dedupe?".

It's like having your next generation capabilities available for the competition to critique and condemn. I think when ZFS Deupe has been tested and approved by the Fishworks team then it will be added to Open Solaris and the interval between OS release and subsequent user testing and the inclusion in Fisworks Applicance kernel will be measured in weeks and not months.

Just thinking like a product manager here. New features can hurt current sales. I know many accounts that won't seriously look at the 7000's until they offer Dedupe. Sad given the other benefits but true.

[Christopher Bergstrom]

afaik this is all legal red tape.. If the code isn't already written, QA'd and ready for putback to onnv-gate I'd be *very* surprised. The only thing that I'm aware of which could speed this up would be pressure on the green-bytes investors to smile and embrace open source community. Instead they are the zeros and bad guys in all this.

[mcdtracy]

I think that integration of the dedupe implementation and testing with the US7000's in the unltimate driver for Sun/Oracle.

When they have something capable of being added to a software update then the legal impasse will be weighed against the costs of a settlement.

The "costs of delay" to the opensource users is a concern but if Sun leveraged that tactic against Greenbytes it would only serve to be a clima for further damages to Greenbytes ability to profit from their work. Not a good strategy for the Big Dog against a start-up seeking a path to revenue/profit.

Let's hope they settle soon and we get to see ZFS add another unigue capability to the ZFS feature set... followed by encrytion as a core capability... and a Global Name Space (pNFS?) capability and on and on...

[Christopher Bergstrom]

I'm not sure I follow your exact thought on why delaying the dedup putback would be a tactic against Greenbytes. Unless I'm mistaken because of the CDDL and the patent clause they can't push the source public until this is resolved.

Regardless of this myself and another storage developer are plotting to get the funds to possibly implement this and a few other features. Myself and others are quite frankly tired of red tape.. Anyone game to chip in?