Welcome to the ZFS Community!
Today, build 27 of OpenSolaris was released to the community. Included
in this release is ZFS, Sun's next generation filesystem. We are proud
to announce the creation of the ZFS community to discuss and develop ZFS
for the future. You can find the community at:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs
Be sure to look for blogs relating to ZFS at:
http://blogs.sun.com
As well as an introductory screencast produced by Dan Price:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/basics/
For the developers out there, you can find an overview of the source
code at:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/source/
Many thanks to the ZFS and OpenSolaris teams for making this a reality.
So what is ZFS?
ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration,
transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense
scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing
technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've
blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at
the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to
use.
ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the
concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions,
provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of
filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only
as much space as it actually needs.
All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is
always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS filesystem, ever. Every
block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is
self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations.
ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. A snapshot is
a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem, while a clone is a
writable copy of a snapshot. Clones provide an extremely space-efficient
way to store many copies of mostly-shared data such as workspaces,
software installations, and diskless clients.
ZFS administration is both simple and powerful. The tools are designed
from the ground up to eliminate all the traditional headaches relating
to managing filesystems. Storage can be added, disks replaced, and data
scrubbed with straightforward commands. Filesystems can be created
instantaneously, snapshots and clones taken, native backups made, and a
simplified property mechanism allows for setting of quotas,
reservations, compression, and more.
Give it a spin, and let us know what you think!
- The ZFS Team
--
Eric Schrock, Solaris Kernel Development http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock
