Mostly for DR-setups.
I need to replicate data to another building. My first thought was using Veeam-replication, but every replication results in a short outage while snapshot is taken. ZFS-replication is working without any problem, but performance is not as good as with starwind.
Have you at least tried Oracle Solaris 11.4? As Gea pointed out, Solaris is much faster than OmniOS.
Support from Oracle is about 900 euro per year per server. I would personally prefer ZFS to any other "solution" like Starwind which frankly speaking has never been proven.
I mean your concern is to lose a single snapshot and you consider Starwind because it's faster?
My current feeling is, that ZFS is GREAT with hybrid-pools, but cannot profit as much as it should from all-flash. I did a test with 24 SAS-SSDs some months ago. Performance was not much better than with a cheap spinning-pool with fast SLOG.
Same story here. Take a good look at Gea's ZFS performance white paper using Intel Optane and you will discover that a pool with Optane is nearly as fast as a full-flash one.
The third "alternative" would be something from DELL-EMC/HP/Netapp...
HPE with 3Par has some nice engineering solution for the DR (but actually most vendors do). There are at two issues here:
- Between the two DC/sites you will need redundant 10Gbps fibre.
- Sync write will kill the performance no matter what
NetApp is more similar to ZFS and it's very nice how it works and the stability in general. Operation is a pleasure and is a true storage. NetApp people will configure it, and you will forget about it.
The real issue with all the traditional vendors (e.g. you're not quoting Hitachi) is the cost. With about 1800 euro per year you can cover two DIY servers using Oracle Solaris. DELL-EMC is more expensive to re-open a support contract for an old SAN than to buy a new one.
You're gonna end up in the > 100K range for two device.