back to article Nexenta trashes Win8 Storage Spaces

Nexenta has scoffed at Microsoft's self-healing Storage Spaces, which is billed as a means of creating and managing pooled virtual drives on Windows 8. What came as a real kick in the pills for the OpenSolaris-meets-Linux biz is the suggestion that Redmond's latest operating system capability has ZFS-like features and that …

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  1. adnim

    All your eggs in one basket?

    "My data collection continues to expand and includes some of my most precious memories, including irreplaceable photos and home videos of my children since their birth,"

    Seems reason enough not to trust that data to third parties... Unless one uses them as an additional backup to whatever backup regime one currently uses.

    I back up my most important data to several devices in two different physical locations. None of them are cloud storage.

  2. Ben Tasker

    "My data collection continues to expand and includes some of my most precious memories, including irreplaceable photos and home videos of my children since their birth"

    Yeah, I have that same problem except I run something regularly. Now what was it called? Oh yeah, a backup.

    Requires no effort on my part per-se, though it does require having storage somewhere else. Occasionally I'll run an optical backup which requires more effort.

    To be fair, I can see what he's saying, but I _really_ do not like the way this is being pitched as a reason not to do normal backups. Average users need encouragement to backup more, not more excuses not to!

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge
      Unhappy

      RAID != Backup

      Exactly!

      After all, a RAID system can still lose all of your data through:

      A) Gross administrative error (for home user, the Windows "rescue CD" works quite well at this by formatting and re-imaging the typical PC).

      B) Mild administrative error by deleting and clearing recycle bin.

      C) Being lost to theft, fire, PSU over-voltage, multiple HDD failures, etc.

      Off-site backup is best, but for now the cheap/free options are too small, the paid for a bit expensive for Joe Average, and broadband a bit limited to upload your 200GB+ collection of photos and videos.

      An of-site portable HDD works (e.g. have 2 on/off site and swap every week, etc), but too much effort often, so often its just a on-site backup.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        D) RAID5 write-hole

        E) Supporting media slowly decaying (that's the sneakiest, a bit flipping, here and there, long before the media cannot be read.)

        ZFS takes care of all of these.

        1. IvyKing
          Thumb Up

          ZFS takes care of reason "E" in two ways. First is a much larger checksum, making it unlikely that disk errors will pass unnoticed. Second is disk scrubbing that regulars reads all of the disk data to spot incipient disk failure, usually signaled by read retries.

          1. Kebabbert

            data corruption

            There are no checksums in normal filesystems that detect if data has been altered because of bit rot, or time decay.

            ZFS has checksums to detect bit rot.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm

    "Windows 8 Storage Spaces does nothing to change the fundamental facts about Windows for storage. It just isn’t enterprise class."

    I think that instead of "It just isn't enterprise class.", he meant "Windows isn't any good"!

  4. regadpellagru
    Facepalm

    Redmond << ZFS

    To be honest, it was really borderline to put references of such a brilliant system as ZFS

    side by side with anything coming from Redmond, the firm which keeps discovering things

    invented in the 60s, only later during the 21st century !

    When/if they come up with a meaninglfull progression bar for files copy, yes, they

    may address advanced storage technology. Meantime, they have plenty to fix.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Please tell me you're not pressing 'ENTER' every time you get near the edge of the edit box... Oh God, you are....

      This tells me all I need to know...

      1. Vigilante
        Stop

        He's probably using Chrome

        Chrome allows you to resize editboxes on any website, but the downside to this is that sometimes the end of the lines in the resized editbox are sent in forms as line breaks.

        That's more likely, I've seen it happen a few times, so I try to only use it occasionally and on sites which strip them out.

  5. heyrick Silver badge

    Hang on a mo...

    "easy to use solution that maximizes utilization of my ever-growing collection of USB drives"

    On the face of it, this sounds brilliant. You buy a new USB drive, you plug it in, it gets added to the drive pool and your logical volume has <this much> free space.

    But, wait, do you now need to power up with *all* of those USB drives active? Can you remove some? Will the system work around this? If so, how - would random files vanish? What happens if you recreate a file and then reconnect a drive that has a different version of that same file?

    Given the prices USB drives *used* to be (and might be again in a year or so unless the HDD cartels get too greedy), it might be worth investing in one or two to use as a backup device. Certainly, pushing a wodge of data to a 250-500Gb plug-in drive is going to be easier than screwing around with DVD-Rs (4.4/~7.9Gb apiece) or Bluray (25/50Gb apiece). To run a non-redundant multiple-volume system would seem, to me, to be "keeping all your eggs in one basket".

    1. JC_
      WTF?

      RTFA

      No, only a quorum of drives needs to be connected for the space to be accessible. Yes, drives can be removed. The system will rebuild/reallocate appropriately. It is redundant (as long as more than one disk is in the system).

      Christ almighty, don't you think that MS might have considered all this already?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They'll be inventing NFS next, and getting rid of CIFS.

  7. dogged

    In other news, water still wet

    Because clearly MS were pitching a Windows 8 desktop feature as "Enterprise Class".

    Who is this dickhead again?

  8. Leedos
    Happy

    Bravo MS

    You know you’re doing something right when it starts to irritate companies like Nexenta. I applaud Microsoft for at least doing something in storage. Sure it's not ZFS, but it's a whole lot better than just NTFS. NTFS is just not goo enough anymore. That's why I'm using ZFS for server storage. I would like to see this new Resilient File System and Storage Spaces clustered on Windows 8 Server. All they need are iSCSI and FCoE targets and some network replication. If that happens more than a few storage vendors will have to think about something new to do. It may not be ZFS, but if it's close then we all will benefit. Windows is not going away.

  9. Vigilante
    Meh

    Competing vendor...

    ... labels competing product as crap.

    Well colour me shocked - a company that chooses to claim its competitors have crap products and theirs aren't. I would have expected nothing less.

    However, instead of taking the time to extol the virtues of their own products, they choose instead to dismiss Storage Spaces as nothing more than a frivolity - when Microsoft have not stated that it is even going to be released as an enterprise feature, and hence not even a truly competing product.

    The issue i see here is that Nexenta is threatened by this - and probably for good reason, Microsoft has made an immense amount of money catering to the 95% of consumers, businesses and enterprises that their software works for - I can easily see an upscale version of Storage Spaces becoming commonplace in a few years in business environments that don't need the resilience of a full scale ZFS setup, but want something more manageable than a boatload of separate drives.

    1. Ben Tasker

      LMFTFY

      "Microsoft have made an immense amount of money catering to the 95% of consumers, businesses and enterprises that" put up with their software because they don't feel they've another choice

      I'm getting asked about alternatives more and more regularly, but a lot of businesses are tied in by some business critical application (some, thankfully will run on Wine).

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