Due to me not working for OSNews these past eight weeks, I've been a bit out of the loop, as I didn't really follow technology news. I did notice that a lot is going on in OpenSolaris land, and today, Oracle has outlined what it has planned for Solaris 11 - and according to some, the fears about OpenSolaris' future were justified.
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Member since:2006-07-14
Technology always moves faster than you think. In planning adoption for a storage technology, you'd have to be completely naive to not evaluate the future of the product you are going to use for your valuable data. There is a good reason why people dropped plans for supporting Reiser 4. If you really look at the design of the two File Systems, its hard not to be bullish on BTRFS. Everyone who is already on Linux will also have ZFS like capabilities on all their storage devices. That's huge.
As for timing I guessed a year. Maybe two, depending on your intended use. If Ubuntu makes it their default file system, as suggested, You'll get a lot of bug fixes pretty quickly. Just hope they submit those back to the mainline 
Member since:2005-07-11
Until it gets support for RAID levels above 1, it'll be hard to even consider it for a lot of storage applications. The patches for this have been "just around the corner" for over a year now.
Until it gets support for deduplication, it'll be hard to consider it for a lot of storage applications. There aren't even any plans for adding this at this time.
Until it gets support for proper volume management (or better integration with LVM/md) it won't be a good fit for use in storage systems with 10/20/30/hundreds of disks.
Actually, until Linux gets a storage stack comparable to ZFS in OSol/FreeBSD or GEOM in FreeBSD, it's not a good fit for many storage applications.
Maybe for desktops with 1-4 drives, or for laptops with 1-2 drives, or for small servers with 1-4 drives, Btrfs may be useful (nothing but RAID10). But for large storage servers with 24+ drive bays, or for storage arrays that can handle multiple 48-bay enclosures, it's just nowhere near ready.
Anyone who believes otherwise is seriously deluding themselves.
Member since:2005-07-11
The other issue to consider is that there is a large industry around ZFS-based storage solutions, and absolutely 0 companies using Btrfs as the basis for a storage solution. Someone looking for a turnkey solution, for a simple "plug it in and go" box, it's easy to end up with a box that uses ZFS internally (Nexenta, GreenBytes, even FreeNAS, for example). There's nothing like that available for Btrfs.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-11
Nothing that is production ready. Wait a year and BTRFS will be here. If you are looking to the future with your data storage needs, BTRFS is a really good reason to *not* go to ZFS, unless you are already running Solaris everywhere. "
Btrfs is at least 5 years off from being a replacement for ZFS as it stands today. Btrfs is not anywhere near the same league as ZFS right now. It's absolutely hilarious when people try to suggest "some future version of" Btrfs as a viable alternative for ZFS of today.