NexentaStor 3.0.4 released

This week we've launched NexentaStor 3.0.4. In many ways this is a significant milestone, far beyond what may be immediately obvious. For existing Nexenta customers, the feature list will look largely unchanged -- many of the same, great universal storage features available since 3.0.0 earlier this year. But for one who studies how organizations grow and mature, the release represents the best quality, stability, and maturity ever. We have been working hard to earn your trust for protecting your data. I think you will be pleased with the result.

From a ZFS perspective, there have been many bug fixes and stability improvements. This release also deprecates the global ZIL disable feature. If you've ever attended my training courses or research sessions on ZFS, you know that I'm not a big fan of disabling the ZIL or the ease with which disabling the ZIL can be accomplished in NexentaStor. But there are a few, special cases where the performance trade-off is justified. In NexentaStor 3.0.4 you can set the ZIL use policy on a per-dataset basis. In ZFS terms, this is called "ZIL synchronicity" and is three parts really good stuff and one part pun. Special thanks to Robert Milkowski  and the ZFS community for the contribution.

In keeping with Nexenta tradition, a free, temporary licensed edition can be downloaded and installed from the main Nexenta site or the European mirror (thanks Jacco!) Give it a try and see why we think it is the best NexentaStor release yet. Of course, if you already have NexentaStor installed, the NMC command is "setup appliance upgrade" When you do the upgrade, a checkpoint will be made of your current system, so you can roll back if you are unhappy -- appliances are such wonderful things, when implemented properly.