NetApp NFS vs. ZFS and NFS for Maildir

Hi,

I'm evaluating to switch from NetApp to a ZFS appliance (like Qsan). Our setup is Dovecot, Maildir for email storage and NFS to share mailboxes (more than 30k users) across POP/IMAP and MX servers.

NetApp NFS works fine also under high load but have some limitation for inode numbers per Volume and is expensive (but recently their prices have dropped).

ZFS, I read, suggest to create many small Raid Group to increase IOPS, but this configuration (N Raid instead of one RAID-DP like NetApp) is more complex to manage, or not?

Someone has experiences with ZFS and NFS(v3) in high load environments?

Thanks

Alessio Cecchi Postmaster @ http://www.qboxmail.it https://www.linkedin.com/in/alessice