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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