A few days ago the ZFS on Linux people finally produced a production release of their latest code. I had been playing around a bit with it on an Ubuntu VM, but yesterday I installed it on a customer's RedHat 6.2 production system. This system will be used to store PostgreSQL backups made with the barman package, and the feature we most wanted to use was the builtin file system compression - mainly to save on space requirements. Installing it and turning a SAN volume into a ZFS volume turned out to be incredibly easy and painfree. And it's a win-win situation. The IO time saved by using a compressed file system has reduced the time for a backup by about 60%, and the space saved in our case is about 80%. All in all I'm impressed, and I'm certainly going to be trying out some more of its features. It will be nice to ascertain what modes will be best suited to production database use.
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