It is the late 1990s and the computer server world is dominated by enterprise UNIX operating systems – all competing with each other. Windows 2000 is not out yet and Windows NT 4 is essentially a toy that lesser mortals run on their Intel PCs which they laughingly call ‘servers’. Your company has a commercial UNIX and its called Solaris. Your UNIX is very popular and is a leading platform. Your UNIX however has some major deficiencies when it comes to storage.

IRIX – a competing proprietary UNIX – has the fantastic XFS file system which vastly out performs your own file system which is still UFS (“Unix File System” – originally developed in the early 1980s) and doesn’t even have journalling – until Solaris 7 at least (in November 1998). IRIX had XFS baked into it from 1994. IRIX also had a great volume manager – where as Solaris’ ‘SVM’ was generally regarded as terrible and was an add-on product that didn’t appear as part of Solaris itself until Solaris 8 in 2000. //

ZFS – and sadly btrfs – are both rooted in a 1990s monolithic model of servers and storage. btrfs hasn’t caught on in Linux for a variety of reasons, but most of all its because it simply isn’t needed. XFS runs rings around both in terms of performance, scales to massive volume sizes. LVM supports XFS by adding COW snapshots and clones, and even clustering if you so wanted. I believe the interesting direction in file systems is actually things like Gluster and Ceph – file systems designed with the future in mind, rather than for a server model we’re not running any more. ///

Interesting to compare the comments to the disparaging statements in the article.

ZFS combines hardware and software layers, combines volume, disk & partition management in one application.

It is the only production ready journaled CoW file system with data integrity management.

Btrfs is not production ready.