[indiana-discuss] What's wrong with Nexenta? (was: Simple Question #1)

[Jeff Abbott]

Eric Boutilier wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Jun 2007, Jeff Abbott wrote:
>> ...
>> Nexenta comes very, very close to what I'm after, but I have 
>> reservations about considering it for production use.
> 
> Jeff -- Could you expand on that as well? No doubt it'd be really good if
> there were less developer/end-user segregation between nexenta.com
> (gnusolaris.org) and opensolaris.org. Is that at the root of your
> reservations? E.g. Nexenta doesn't participate directly with the
> OpenSolaris Community -- it'd be nice to see them have a project space or
> be part of a related one(s). (Not to mention Community Groups, voting
> activities, Contributor/Core Contributor programs, Nevada putbacks, etc.).

The separation of Nexenta from the OpenSolaris community is a large part 
of it, as you say.  It's also that they bill it as an alpha, which makes 
me slightly skeptical about trusting it, but not so much so that it's 
the biggest hindrance to my adopting it.  It's tough to put into words, 
but the idea of using Nexenta in a production server and workstation -- 
and laptop, once power management Gets There(TM) -- environment just 
makes me sort of uneasy.  Vendor support for it, both software and 
hardware, is sub-par, so that has a lot to do with it.  It also doesn't 
seem as approachable a community as OpenSolaris -- I've found the 
OpenSolaris community to be second only to Ubuntu in terms of 
accessibility and openness, and for that many people are to be commended.

I love apt, though.  Or yum.  Or up2date.  Or Paludis.  Or whatever; the 
software itself isn't what I like so much as what the software lets me 
do.  I also like the idea of personalities as it allows users to tailor 
their environment to their needs, something Solaris has always made far 
more possible than other Unixes.  You want non-GNU userspace in Linux? 
Ha!  Even FreeBSD has gmake.

I wish I had more concrete information for you.  It just /feels/ like 
Nexenta isn't something I could safely say, "Let's put this in 
production," about.  It's got all the bits -- ZFS, DTrace, zones, apt -- 
but it lacks the blessing.

Thanks,
Jeff