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- Added by Deirdré Straughan, last edited by Deirdré Straughan on Jun 12, 2012 (view change)
ZFS is a future proof file system - and also a logical volume manager - which gives us:
- Fast file system creation: The creation and startup of additional zones (“SmartMachines” in Joyent terminology) – in other words, adding new paying customers — is nearly instantaneous.
- Data integrity is guaranteed, with particular emphasis on preventing silent data corruption.
- Storage pools: “virtualized storage” makes administrative tasks and scaling far easier. To expand storage capacity, all you need to do is add new disks (hard disks, flash memory, and whatever may come along in the future) to a zpool.
- Snapshots: ZFS’ copy-on-write transactional model makes it possible to capture a snapshot of an entire file system at any time, storing only the differences between that and the working file system as it continues to change. This creates a backup point that the administrator can easily roll back to.
- Clones: Snapshots of volumes and filesystems can be cloned, creating an identical copy. Cloning is nearly instantaneous and initially consumes no additional disk space. This facilitates the rapid creation of new, nearly identical, VMs.
- The ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) improves file system and disk performance, driving down overall system latency.
News
Jan 31, 2012 - ZFS now available for Mac!
Videos
- The Future of LibZFS illumos user group meeting Jan 2012
- ZFS Feature Flags illumos user group meeting Jan 2012
- ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems - 3-hour deep dive video with Bonwick and Moore
- various versions of the slides are available, including this from someone who hated Sun and yet thought ZFS "Worth running Solaris to get".
- ZFS on Solaris Internals site
- ZFS in the Trenches (video)
- ZFS Revisited - Understanding ZFS & ZFS ARC/L2ARC (blog post)
- Activity of the ZFS ARC (blog post)
- ZFS Workshop at LISA 08 (6 hours of video!)
- ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems - 2.5 hours of Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore at the SNIA Software Developers' Conference, Sept, 2008 - a very thorough foundation on the guts of ZFS.
- all Deirdré's ZFS videos
Blogs
- Jeff Bonwick's blog (now defunct but still historically useful)
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