Selling ZFS

I was at a customer site today to talk about storage and NAS. And again the usual problem. There is a catch in selling ZFS to customers. When you tell them of the RAID-5 write hole or silent data corruption they ask you: "Do you tell me that my data isn´t secure on your products without ZFS?". When you say "yes" you discredited you current product line. When you say "no", they don´t see the need for thinking about such topics like verifiable data integrity and mirror self healing.

The problem is even worse than you think at the first time: We are the only company talking about a complete verifiable file system and the problems inherent in conventional filesystems/volumes. To many customers see this as a sun-only problem but it´s an industry-wide problem of file storage on rotating rust. It´s difficult to deeducate you customers from the belief that data on disk is immutable unless you willingly change it without set him in panic mode.