Can you say learning curve! I’m not talking YouTube video learning curve, I’m talking full on technical for the really nerdy IT Systems Administrator learning curve.

I feel lucky because I have my own home lab to research my projects before I really get to it. Between virtual machines in the lab and Digital Ocean I can package almost anything in an environment similar to production. If I blow it all up it takes minutes to reassemble it. I blow a lot of shit up during testing!

I totally underestimated FreeNAS. I thought I knew enough about RAID, volumes, clusters, de-dupe and all that stuff to simply walk right on in and have the killer NAS up and running over the weekend. HAHAHAHAHA! Welcome to FreeNAS and ZFS file systems.

I thought I would do some research to get a basic understanding. I knew I was in for a ride when I realized ZFS was originally created by Sun Microsystems. After Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle the ZFS project was removed from open source. A group of the original design engineers spun the project into OpenZFS in 2013 and maintain it as open source.

Here’s the Wiki link for a ZFS history lesson: Wikipedia, ZFS

Here’s the link to the OpenZFS Wiki: Wikipedia:OpenZFS

Just the names of the companies involved let me know this was enterprise level stuff and not the typical end user Best Buy, Seagate or Western Digital backup system. If you want a storage device to backup your PC and keep your ITunes music on, this aint it! Go to Best Buy and get a USB drive with a pre-loaded app. It will save you some brain cells, sleep, coffee and weeks of reading to get a basic grasp of ZFS.

I’ve reloaded my test rig so many times I think my USB drive started to smoke. I really had to let go of some standards from RAID technology to understand how the whole ZFS thing works. Trust me, I feel like I only read the introduction of a book that’s a thousand pages long.

Amazes me when I consider the individuals that dream this stuff up. There are some really smart people out there. Scary smart.