Most of the information surrounding ZFS online is sadly noise, not signal. And most of that noise is "wow so enterprise storage infrastructure", which breaks down into a) Here's All The Complicated Things I'm Gonna Do And How I'm Gonna Do Them and b) I Broke It, Help.
So it seems dizzying and unstable, but the dizzying bit is just nerd ego and hype, and the instability is also just nerd ego meets inevitability. (Now I think about it, it's a bit reminiscent of the abandoned "ABC shall be the ultimate XYZ" software you sometimes find online, and scriptkiddie mentality.)
ZFS is just a reasonable, mostly solid, somewhat idiosyncratic filesystem with nice features. Most of the failure noise online is from people who have no idea what they're doing; there are curiously (good-suspiciously) few public reports of commercial-scale data loss et al.
I've taken to using it as the root filesystem on a couple of Debian boxes. The Debian install instructions are both overblown and also almost hilariously broken, but that's a devops/sysadmin documentation failure, and not ZFS' fault. I spent a few years on Slackware, and have found the ZFS setup experience reminds me of that rock-solid-meets-flying-by-the-seat-of-ones-pants mentality.
So it seems dizzying and unstable, but the dizzying bit is just nerd ego and hype, and the instability is also just nerd ego meets inevitability. (Now I think about it, it's a bit reminiscent of the abandoned "ABC shall be the ultimate XYZ" software you sometimes find online, and scriptkiddie mentality.)
ZFS is just a reasonable, mostly solid, somewhat idiosyncratic filesystem with nice features. Most of the failure noise online is from people who have no idea what they're doing; there are curiously (good-suspiciously) few public reports of commercial-scale data loss et al.
I've taken to using it as the root filesystem on a couple of Debian boxes. The Debian install instructions are both overblown and also almost hilariously broken, but that's a devops/sysadmin documentation failure, and not ZFS' fault. I spent a few years on Slackware, and have found the ZFS setup experience reminds me of that rock-solid-meets-flying-by-the-seat-of-ones-pants mentality.