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This approach has additional advantages:
- Our partner company recently started parallel efforts on improving performance of Zfs Zvol. They would require a playground for their development and benchmarking activities. More importantly, in the bundle Qemu / SCSI_virtio / SCSI_vhost / file_io / Zfs_zvols, zfs_zvols is the least tested component, since it is not used so widely as other features of zfs. Also linux has only recently become an important target for zfs to run on, and may require specific kernel patches to improve stability. But even for the greater final goal we still need to perform this testing, and it is better to start it earlier while we can reach Klara Inc. for our partner for help.
- We have important customers which are very interested to have storage with redundancy (aka RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). As of now we do not support software RAID. If zvol stress testing demonstrates level mature enough for production, we can provide this anticipated feature already in September 2021
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