[richardkmichael]

EDIT: I realize you said "near" and "closer" to production ready, but I think it's worth mentioning --

No FUD intended, but I don't consider ZFS on Linux production ready. Wanting to use ZFS, I recently started regularly reading their GitHub issues.

There are deadlocks and un-importable pools in certain situations (hard-links being one: think rsync). I would not want production boxes in the same predicaments experienced by several bug reporters. Moreover, applying debug and hot-fix (hopefully) kernel patches and the associated downtime in production is a no-go for me.

Mind you, the project leads are very responsive and it's making great strides.

In addition, I believe the Linux implementation currently lacks the L2ARC (which can make ZFS really fly, caching to SSDs).

However, I would absolutely run ZFS on Illumos or Solaris; for the stability and article-mentioned compression benefits.

[dpe82]

I'm using ZFS with L2ARC and write logs on an SSD on Ubuntu right now. Not sure I'd use it in production yet for the reasons you mention, but for things like my home workstation and office NAS it works great!