Can XFS or GlusterFS replace my ZFS needs?

Solution 1:

♡ Hey there...

I read this question as really being a problem with the FreeBSD NFS stack...

ZFS works very well on the supported platforms. So much so, that I've moved most of my ZFS systems running Solaris and NexentaStor to Linux (RHEL/CentOS), thanks to the ZFS on Linux project. If you're using ZFS now, going to anything else is a step backwards.

I'm curious about the following, though:

• How much data are you storing?
• How many NFS clients do you have?
• Have you performed any NFS tuning on your existing servers?
• Are you using any form of L2ARC read caching on the existing setup? How much RAM do you have?
• What is the hardware configuration of your servers?

Regardless of the answers to the above, you have a few options...

• Fix or debug your FreeBSD issue. NFS shouldn't crash servers. It may be worth getting to the root-cause of this problem if you have a lot of time invested in this setup.
• Convert to ZFS on another platform. NexentaStor, Linux, Solaris, OpenIndiana are pretty solid on the NFS side.

All-in, some combination of XFS and a cluster filesystem can so some of the same things as ZFS, but it's not a direct comparison. I don't think you should abandon ZFS yet.

Solution 2:

I would go for a mix of technologies.

• Software RAID6, use Linux RAID capabilities with the mdadm tool.
• snapshots, I would go for LVM.
• ACL and quotas, no problem for XFS and the common utilities.

You can also opt for the fairly new Btrfs if you like adventures.