Conceptually, and I don't think I am alone here, I love the concepts of ZFS. You can create one big disk, everything is stored on multiple drives, and you can grow and shrink the pool and drive at any time. Plus, the disks don't need to be same etc.
What I hate about ZFS is that, best I can tell, its only truly stable form on Solaris running on Oracle (formerly Sun) hardware. Sure, OpenSolaris exists, and FreeBSD has ZFS support, but reliability is generally said to be poor when on FreeBSD/OpenSolairs/Solaris on non oracle hardware.
We run (exclusively at the moment) Window Server 2008 R2 servers. What is the "next best" DAS storage option for this OS? I can't find a ZFS implementation for windows, so that's out. There are a myrad of RAID cards out there: can someone recommend a setup that approaches ZFS flexibility? A setup where you can just add a disk to the pool and bam more storage without having to take the server down for rebuild?
In Sum: if you love ZFS but want to run Windows Server 2008 R2 whats your best/coolest option(s)?
PS: This is for in production systems, budget is on the order of 10k per system.
Best Answer
As far as I know, really the only option you have that approaches being somewhat reliable is to get a SAN that implements storage virtualization and connect your windows servers to it via iSCSI/FC/FCoE/etc.
The SAN will be able to give you similar features as ZFS does: snapshots, dynamic volume sizing, cloning, etc.