> It's unlikely Oracle will buckle, although it's theoretically possible > they'll lose. That would uphold NetApp's patents and potentially make > the use of ZFS illegal without a license from NetApp.
>From what they said they have prior art, so that should shoot it down pretty quick. > Coraid's primary business, and certainly the vast majority of their > product line, is about SAN storage: providing arrays of storage bits > over the network. None of that has anything to do with ZFS. A common > thing to do with those bits is create a file system for export (via > NFS or whatnot) to other hosts; this is what Coraid's Z-series line > does. ZFS is a popular option for how to implement that, and I gather > what the Z-series uses internally (or what's NetApp on about?), but > certainly isn't the only option. The installation I'm planning for, > for example, hasn't been considering ZFS. So NetApp was basically posturing and ZFS is not fundamental to their business. Maybe the publisher would be willing to publish a followup stating that ZFS is not, and was never, a fundamental part of the product and that it is only one of something like 50 different file systems. I get the feeling that NetApp is afraid of their competitors bring out superior products. Anyway, thanks for the info. EBo --
