ZFS
ZFS keeps your data safe and makes data and disk administration fast
and easy by removing traditional limitations in filesystem design. It
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.
OpenZFS Developers’ Summit
The first was held November 18-19, 2013. The goals of the event were:
- to foster cross-platform community discussions of OpenZFS work
- to make progress on some of the projects proposed for this community.
Video recordings of the presentations are
in the OpenZFS channel on YouTube.
See the OpenZFS site for more details.
Videos:
Learning and Using ZFS
Presentations
ZFS for Users
ZFS for Developers
Blogs