I did some comparison of ZFS vs XFS last week to review the current state of the art in filesystems.

Long story short. XFS is still the reigning champion (at least on Linux). XFS beats out most filesystem benchmarks across the board. Reiser does well on directories with lots of small files but not enough to justify not using XFS.

Reiser FS is out of the picture honestly. First, it just doesn’t perform very well. Second, Hans Reiser is probably going to prison for murdering his wife and is selling the company to pay off his legal costs.

ZFS would have a shot on …

Some of the common conceptions of data storage seem to have been blown out of the water.

Two things I found interesting:

In their study they found that there was no correlation between disk failure rates and utilization, environmental conditions such as temperature, or age. This means that high disk utilization or age of the disk have no significant impact on the probability that it will fail.

…

They observed that older disks had a much lower failure rates then newer disks, where the newer disks in general were less expensive.

Which makes me think that buying used HDDs off Craigslist might not be a bad idea.

One could buy cheap 15k RPM low latency disks from a few years ago and forget about the storage capacity in exchange for FAST seek time.

Of course it depends on how …

Hurry up, submit a paper! The LinuxTag Call for Papers ends tomorrow, February 16th.

Short info about LinuxTag from the homepage:

LinuxTag 2007 opens doors from May 30 to June 2, 2007 on Berlin Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users and experts to learn at Europe’s leading conference and expo more about the potential of Linux, Open Source, and Free Software.

Today, the industry's most prolific open source investor announced that it has raised another fund. 350 million Euros worth. This can only be a good thing for open source.

Index, perhaps best known for its investment in Skype, but the firm has done a slew of interesting investments (last.fm, FON, Oanda, Mobissimo, etc.). Danny Rimer, one of the partners there, gets my vote as one of the top venture capital investors anywhere, and especially when it comes to open source. MySQL, Pentaho, Trolltech, SourceLabs, and Zend all got early funding from Index.

Not sure what Index does that makes it so successful, but it's got to …

Yet another industry alliance has formed (Open Solutions Alliance), in the tradition of OSDL. This one, however, promises not to fail where OSDL did (i.e., it will not focus on just one technology) because it will provide

"...business level advocacy. We need to talk to sets of customers about open source applications, make them aware of what's out there."Thus spake Barry Klawans to Dana.

It's not a bad goal. My problem with the premise is that I haven't met any enterprises that need help buying into open source. Quite the opposite. The problem we're having is managing growth, not sparking it. If the solution to be solved is customers buying into open source applications, then there is …

An addition to The Long Tail of “The Long Tail” related blogs

The Long Tail effect of open source has been discussed in several contexts. Some of the interpretations are likely very different from what Chris Anderson intended, but more and more niche needs of a relatively small set of people (which don’t have economies to justify product development by proprietary software companies) are being met by open source software. Witness more than 140,000 projects registered on SourceForge.

Whenever I install Red Hat Linux I am amused by some of the choices available for the language of the operating system - what is different when running a Red Hat box with English(Singapore) vs. English(India)!? It is also heartening to see support for regional languages making computers accessible to even remote villages (which don’t provide economic motivation to proprietary OS providers).

The long tail effect of open source …

I will be talking about backup and recovery of Web applications at SCALE 5x. Characteristics of Web applications create unique requirements for backup and recovery. The talk will discuss open source backup and recovery tools for file systems, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Conference guru blog provides more information on my session.

I would be happy to meet folks who are interested in Amanda, ZRM for MySQL and open source backups in general before or after the session.

Larry Augustin was in town over the weekend, so we met up at Deer Valley for lunch and gossip. We then spent a half-hour talking through the different licensing models available to open source software vendos, and their relative merits/demerits. (No wonder Larry's wife and daughter got bored and left. ;-)

The core question up for discussion? Is 100% free source software the best model for any software vendor? I went into it wanting to say 'Yes,' but left wondering.

First off, we identified a range of strategies/services a vendor can offer that fall between a pure support model and a pure proprietary license model. Look around at many open source companies (and virtually all proprietary software companies), and you notice, as Larry said, a …

Charlie Babcock has a fantastic article on the rising tide of open source in the latest edition of InformationWeek. As I've written recently, the bar is getting lower to launch a successful open source business. That said, there are tens of thousands of lame open source projects, for every good one (the same is true of proprietary software, btw). As Babcock writes:

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out. …

Wondering what the Oracle announcement of Unbreakable Linux has done for Oracle, and to Red Hat? The results aren't pretty, but the company getting pounded might surprise you:

Note to Mr. Ellison: Better try a different strategy. This one is not working, as Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports.) And I'm not talking about Oracle providing commercial support for MySQL. I somehow think that will be even less successful.

Just work on supporting your own software.

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