[OmniOS-discuss] Status of VAAI

[Dan McDonald]

On Aug 5, 2014, at 4:43 PM, Günther Alka <alka at hfg-gmuend.de> wrote:
> 
> If Nexenta would give Illumian more love, it might become the leading free Illumos distribution
> but I do not expect that this will happen.

Many ex-Sun types who aren't Joyent like IPS.  I don't think Illumian, with its Debian-ish-ness, would appeal to them.

> The other „big players“ like Delphix, Joyent or
> OmniOS seems to have no interest  in such storage features

REALLY!?!?  Delphix has been BIG on improvements to storage, specifically in the ZFS realm.  That's an irresponsible use of a broad brush stroke.  And Delphix has fixed some iSCSI stuff that Nexenta didn't catch.  Yes, Nexenta's done the most outside of ZFS improvements to help storage -- it's their jobs (e.g. SMB/CIFS).  Don't blow off the other players, though, please.

OmniTI isn't explicitly in the storage business, so its illumos resources (mostly me) are directed to where they can do the most good for OmniTI and OmniOS.

> as well as improvements in
> encryption (hey we need this)

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY with money to spend has asked any of the major players about on-disk encryption.  I spent just shy of 3 years at Nexenta, and I asked this question repeatedly both inside and out: no paying customers wanted it.

There's also the issue of the ZFS crypto patent - folks are (with good reason) afraid of it. ZFS crypto didn't land in the Oracle Solaris source until AFTER the barn door had been closed.  There's no CDDL grounds to protect people.  The work-in-progress ZFS crypto I've seen kicked around is not complete enough, either.

FYI,
Dan