ZFS -- the killer app for FreeBSD?

Okay, so here's my issue. I have two iSCSI appliances. Nevermind why I have two iSCSI appliances, they were what was available, so that is what I'm using. So I want my backups mirrored between them. Furthermore, I want my backups to be versioned so I can access yesterday's backup or last month's backup without a problem. Furthermore, I want my backups to look like complete snapshots of the system that was backed up as of that specific point in time. Furthermore, because my data set is highly compressible in part and highly de-duplicable in part, I want it compressed as necessary and dedupe'ed as necessary.

So, how can I do this with Linux? Well... there is a LUFS version of ZFS that will sort of, maybe, do it in a way that regularly loses data and performs terribly. There is BTRFS which is basically a Linuxy re-implementation of ZFS that does compression but not deduplication, and which is still very much a beta-quality thing at present, they didn't even have a fsck program for it until this spring. And ... that's it. In short, I can only do it slowly and buggy.

So at present I have a FreeBSD virtual machine in my infrastructure happily digesting backups and bumping the snapshot counter along. And ZFS is a first-class citizen in FreeBSD land, not a castaway in LUFS-land like on Linux. I'd love to use BTRFS for this. But BTRFS today is at about the same stage as ZFS on Solaris in 2005, when it was an experimental feature in OpenSolaris, or ZFS on FreeBSD in 2008 when the first buggy port was released. ZFS on FreeBSD is stable and rock solid today, and BTRFS, realistically, isn't going to be stable and rock solid for another three or four years at least.

So if you haven't investigated ZFS on FreeBSD to manage large data sets in a versioned, compressed, and deduplicated fashion, perhaps you should. It solves this problem *today*, not a half decade from now. And a bird in hand is worth a dozen in four years.

- ELG