Have you heard of a term called ZFS? If you are Apple fansboy, you may know ZFS supported in Leopard. But, what really ZFS is?
ZFS stand for Zettabyte File System. It was designed and implemented by a team at Sun Microsystem. And, it is a file system for Sun’s Solaris Operating System. Unlike traditional file systems, ZFS is a fundamentally new approach to data management. It provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.
Here is the list of ZFS features:
1. Provable integrity - it checksums all data (and meta-data), which makes it possible to detect hardware errors (hard disk corruption, flaky IDE cables..). Read how ZFS helped to detect a faulty power supply after only two hours of usage, which was previously silently corrupting data for almost a year!
2. Atomic updates - means that the on-disk state is consistent at all times, there’s no need to perform a lengthy filesystem check after forced reboots/power failures.
3. Instantaneous snapshots and clones - it makes it possible to have hourly, daily and weekly backups efficiently, as well as experiment with new system configurations without any risks.
4.Built-in (optional) compression
5. Highly scalable
6. Pooled storage model - creating filesystems is as easy as creating a new directory. You can efficiently have thousands of filesystems, each with it’s own quotas and reservations, and different properties (compression algorithm, checksum algorithm, etc..).
7.Built-in stripes (RAID-0), mirrors (RAID-1) and RAID-Z
This video explains what ZFS is and show how to creating storage pools, file systems, and shares in ZFS.
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