List: How about a ZFS demo day ?
On Feb 28, Moinak and I presented at MVIT, a college close to the Bengaluru International Airport. Though we intended to present many things related to Belenix, a major chunk of our presentation comprised of ZFS related demos. There was even a moment when Moinak delete 14 GB of data from my laptop's home folder and then we recovered all that back within seconds :) There were a number of questions from people on ZFS. The mystifying bits were about whether snapshots are backups or not, how rollbacks work, etc. Moinak and I offered to the students there that we could conduct a session dedicated to ZFS. I've jotted down somethings that we could do: - Instant backups - Reverting backups - Exchanging backups with other computers and users - Adding space without worrying about partitions - Instant partitions/formatting - Sharing files on the network - Automatic compression of storage - Backing up your files/file systems regularly Server side storage made easy - Reliable storage using cheap disks - How reliable is 'reliable' ? - How to add terabytes of data without storage slowdowns (this is a problem with conventional SAN storage servers) - Sharing files with users - Portable file systems for users - Reduce duplication using snapshots and clones - Increasing reliability of snapshots and clones (what if one disk fails!?) - ZFS based home directories and Delegated Administration - ZFS for all ! Virtualization fun - VirtualBox - Multiple Guest Instances, lesser storage - Connecting with VMWare ESXi for free Virtualization - Running Linux apps with ZFS based storage Somethings that I've not tried enough to be able to showcase: - iSCSI - High speed storage for Windows, Linux, OSX and Solaris machines - your own network drive, and with the file system of your choice - Antivirus Scanning - Server side antivirus scanning of all files (except on iSCSI file systems, where the file system is owned by the consumer rather than the storage server). - Linux inside a Zone (zones need some fixing on Belenix, but we could use OpenSolaris 2008.11 for this in case Belenix is not fixed on time) -- Sriram