Oracle ZFS Reviews

Our main use case for Oracle ZFS is that it's just normal storage for the entire infrastructure, so we have our systems connected to it.

Everything in Oracle ZFS is great and it's easy to use, making it very user-friendly.

I have used Oracle ZFS Snapshot and Rollback capabilities, and everything has worked well. The Snapshot and Rollback features in Oracle ZFS are awesome - that's one word to describe it. It's cool, very easy, and stress-free.

Without doing benchmarks with other products, I can rate data compression in Oracle ZFS about an eight or nine out of ten, and I have noticed some deduplication and indexing features.

Regarding how Oracle ZFS handles demanding workloads, such as online transaction processing and complex query executions, most of these aspects depend on your configuration setup. For instance, if you are using virtualization and have enterprise solutions on these servers, you can route or place database servers on SSDs or flash disks to enable better throughput from these systems. You can run your operating system on flash disks, or alternatively save ordinary data on SATA disks, depending on where you place your valuable data. The structure will affect performance, so if you plan it properly, you can achieve the best performance, even if the systems are aging or if you don't have the compute power, you can still balance it.

From my experience, we consumers will only ask for one thing from Oracle ZFS: cost improvements.

Regarding the cost, making it 50 percent less would be beneficial, as it cannot be free.

I have been working with Oracle ZFS since 2022, which means three years now, but we were using FX before we upgraded to ZFS.

Ever since inception, we've not had any challenge with Oracle ZFS. It's always running smooth with green lights, and we've not even had any major disk failure.

I have no complaints regarding the stability of Oracle ZFS at all.

I have contacted Oracle technical support for issues several times in the past, but for the past two or three years, we've not had any calls from Oracle regarding any issue. There were some patches we had to run with them because there's one engineered system called the Oracle Mini Cluster that's a bit stubborn with certain tasks. We engaged with Oracle engineers directly because it's an engineered system, and experts were needed to assist. Ever since then, everything has been very stable and extremely reliable.

Positive

Before working with Oracle ZFS for storage, we used Dell storage and HP storage.

We decided to go with Oracle because we bought that infrastructure in 2013, and it had aged. We had challenges with HP then, and it was a strategic management decision to move to Oracle infrastructure due to the kind of database we are using. When using Oracle database, you need to run it properly to get the best performance from it.

Honestly, I was surprised at how easy the setup was. It took less than an hour to finish every configuration, and the mount points and everything were sorted, which makes it more seamless in deployment without any struggle.

Oracle ZFS is easy to scale; you can just get the modules and add them to increase the capacity, and that's it. It's just seamless.

To summarize, I can advise those who want to use Oracle ZFS to consult me, and I'll give them very good counsel for free.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Oracle ZFS a nine.

My company is a team of developers and system integrators and we build cloud services for companies so they can pull stuff back from Google and Microsoft in-house to make it more efficient and use the cloud for overage services. In order to do that, we need compatible services that can run in-house, Azure, Google Cloud, or anywhere else. One of the services we are presently using is ZFS with an S3 layer on top. It matches with what most people use for storage coming out of Azure.

We are currently using Linux ZFS, which is the open-source version.

It is great for box storage, like S3 replacements.

The question is, can it do a lot better? So for example, it could run an airline, and all the computer systems, but can it do it as effectively and efficiently as it could on other systems? No. That's where you start hitting things like you could store library congress on it 50 times, but does that mean that it's usable? If you want to find a book, do you want to wait a minute to get your results back or would you rather get your results back in two seconds? ZFS can always get the job done and it's reliable but it's just not always fast enough, and that's the main problem with it.

ZFS is great for just mass storage, but if you're trying to make fast storage – something like a SAN-type delivery network where you wanted to do any type of RAM disc over the network – it falls flat. ZFS does not do that. It is kind of limiting.

For companies or organizations using Kubernetes, multiple Docker instances, or the spin-up machines needed to handle the workload need quick media just for the host itself to be able to run things quickly, but ZFS does not do that.

What's important these days is, as you run stuff as a cluster, you want to be able to replicate from one cluster to another, whether that's done in the background or is done in near real-time. ZFS just does not do anything of that nature. You have to use a third-party product or Ceph storage, which we use also. So that's why it's limiting from that standpoint.

I have been using this solution for a long time as I was one of the first to get it installed as a beta version.

I would rate the stability of this solution a 9.9 out of 10. It's super reliable.

With ZFS, I never really found anything that it couldn't do. 

We are planning on increasing the current usage mainly because it is reliable but we're probably gonna run something on top of that though. Right now, we are running ZFS as the underlying storage and with an S3 or Ceph layer on top of it. And what we've been doing on a couple of the latest installs, we've been running RDMS on it, and that allows for replications so you can actually have two or three different ZFS pools and replicate between them. That seems to work really well and helps with the speed also. That's kind of our interim solution at the moment.

Considering I am one of the people that mostly help other people out when they get in crunches, I really don't ever need tech support.

From my standpoint, what I would say support-wise is the amount of documentation that's available and being able to get ahold of some of the developers when you have a problem. From that standpoint, I would rate it an eight out of 10.

Positive

I would rate the initial setup a nine out of ten, just simply because I know what the pitfalls are. I've been using it for so long, and I just know what to expect from it. I don't need manuals. I go in and help other people around the country who get stuck or who had problems and I can just walk in and help them because I just understand the product that well.

What we mostly do with ZFS is we set that up locally and we use that as private cloud storage local to the business.

From the cost standpoint, the software doesn't cost anything, and no matter what products you use, you're going to have your own and employee time invested in it. So, if you already have the hardware from another system that you're switching away from, because ZFS will run on anything, then you're not going to have a lot of costs involved. You can have a higher ROI than any other storage system just simply because the costs are much lower, so your ROI is going to be higher.

I would advise others to be very knowledgeable of the product before implementing it; do some mockups with it, including pulling a disc out while the system's running, and then try putting it back in a different order just to get a feeling for whether you are going to be able to handle it when things go wrong.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten overall. It's probably the most well-understood mainstream storage platform that exists right now for pure storage. It is not necessarily for the fastest storage or cluster storage, but just for pure storage, it's really hard to beat. It's just been around as long as anything else.

The replication capability and data security have been the most valuable features.

When retrieving data from the replication of remote sites, it does not give you immediate results. The RPO and RTO rates could be improved. 

We have been using this solution for three and a half years.

This is a stable solution.

This is a scalable solution. 

I would rate the customer support for this solution a four out of five. They could be more responsive and offer a resolution of critical issues faster. 

Oracle is one of the most stable storage solutions that I have comes across. There are not a lot of hardware failures or issues and it requires very minimal maintenance compared to Hitachi or Dell EMC. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

I use Oracle ZFS on my servers and all my VMs run on Oracle ZFS redundant arrays. My NAS which is a separate unit is running TrueNAS and I'm running five drives in an Oracle ZFS array. We have a lot of redundancy there, which has saved us from having a critical data disaster at least three times already in the last five years.

Oracle ZFS is very fast and it is efficient. It has outperformed any hardware array controller that I've ever come across. With Oracle ZFS on my NAS, which is running five, four terabyte drives, when I've had a drive failure and changed one out, it'll rebuild that array in two hours, or maybe less. When you think you're rebuilding almost four terabytes of data redundancy, that's pretty good using an old AMD Turion hardware, that's nothing to complain about.

The data reliability has stood out, it is reliable.

Oracle ZFS does what I've asked it to do, and it has done it very efficiently. The only time I'm running into issues is with Proxmox. If I run ZFS drives, I find my RAM usage is very high. However, I don't have that problem with the TrueNAS system, where I'm running an old N36 Turion with four gigabytes of RAM, and that's running 24/7. There have been no issues with such a low-powered environment there, it works fine, but with Proxmox it seems to go slow.

The ability to upsize and downsize an array can be difficult.

In a feature release, it would be a benefit to have the ability to add an extra drive onto that pool as a spare. This would allow it to automatically rebuild the array onto the standby drive if there is a failure.

I have used Oracle ZFS for approximately five years.

Oracle ZFS is highly stable.

The solution is phenomenal in terms of picking up the warnings on pending drive failure through smart monitoring. When you pull the drive out and rebuild the array, with the new drives, it's been incredibly fast and I have not lost data. I think I've had to rebuild three types, so I can't complain about that.

The scalability is not something that I've had a lot of experience with. In terms of testing I have noticed you are unable to add a new drive onto the Oracle ZFS array, and then have it rebuilt with a new number of drives. You need to back up the data and build the new array and put the data back. In terms of dynamic sizing, and dynamics scaling, I haven't been able to accomplish them yet. I don't know whether that is supported or not, but I haven't been able to do it.

I have had some issues with scaling the solution.

I have not had to contact the support.

I didn't have any problems with the implementation of Oracle ZFS. 

The TrueNAS is integrated into Oracle ZFS. When the drives are set up, you are able to choose ZFS, which ZFS format you want to use, and the level of ZFS you want to use. It is all done by the GUI which is nice and easy. The only problem is with Proxmox, which is possibly a Proxmox problem more than an Oracle ZFS issue. Proxmox could improve by having the ability to add a drive that isn't completely cleaned. For example, you could clean that drive and then configure it within Proxmox. That's probably the only glitch I've had with it.

When you add a new physical drive onto Proxmox, the drive has to be completely free of any data and any partition information. If it even has partition information on it, Proxmox won't see it. You have to wipe that drive first. However, in terms of the Oracle ZFS setup within Proxmox, it is all done by the GUI. Additionally, you can do it by the command line, but it's easy through the GUI. I did not even have to use the command line to set up Oracle ZFS. The functionality that's been built is either the Proxmox or TrueNAS has been very easy to do.

I would rate the implementation of Oracle ZFS a five out of five.

I did the implementation of Oracle ZFS myself.

My advice to others thinking about implementing Oracle ZFS is to look at the options that are out there, get to know the pros and cons, and assess what your needs are going to be before you choose a deployment. I would recommend taking close look at Oracle ZFS.

For my clients, it is about me learning the solution and getting familiar with the intricacy of the systems before I go and advocate it. It doesn't help if go and advocate something that I've got limited experience and then can't support.

I rate Oracle ZFS an eight out of ten.

Simply amazing filesystem. This is years ahead of most other filesystems. The IT community has been waiting for someone to redesign the filesystem instead of changing or upgrading year after year. ZFS is self-redundant, meaning no expensive RAID controllers or rebuilds. Compression is built in, and you can even use deduplication.

Drive scrubbing needs to be run every week for consumer drives, and every month for enterprise drives.

This truly an up-to-date filesystem with advanced features. Deduplication is a must in many enterprise environments. It is very flexible and surprisingly fast. While ZFS uses more ram than other filesystems, there is not a need to upgrade servers. It scales according to your system.

A new kind of a file system which seems to have been written from scratch.It is a pooled storage model that and volumes are no longer needed. Thousands of file systems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs.Every block is checksummed an even silent data corruption cannot happen.If one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it and uses another copy to repair it.ZFS provides built-in compression. It reduces space usage by 2 times as compression is standard.

While we did not experience any performance issues with ZFS , it seems it is quite possible to run into performance issues especially with NFS mounts.

Administration of ZFS is quite simple . No separate filesystem creation step is required. The mount of the filesystem is automatic and does not require vfstab maintenance. It takes away any limits posed on the file sizes that can handles on a file system.