ZFS - Solaris's new Filesystem

Sun Microsystems - Feature Story

ZFS--the last word in file systems.

The breakthrough file system in Solaris 10 delivers virtually unlimited capacity, provable data integrity, and near-zero administration.

Most system administrators take the limitations of current file systems in stride. After all, file systems are what they are: vulnerable to silent data corruption, brutal to manage, and excruciatingly slow.

ZFS, the dynamic new file system in Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS), will make you forget everything you thought you knew about file systems. ZFS will be available on all Solaris 10 OS-supported platforms, and all existing applications will run with it. Moreover, ZFS complements Sun's storage management portfolio, including the Sun StorEdge QFS software, which is ideal for sharing business data.

"We've rethought everything and rearchitected it," says Jeff Bonwick, Sun distinguished engineer and chief architect of ZFS. "We've thrown away 20 years of old technology that was based on assumptions no longer true today."

ZFS is supported on both SPARC and x86 platforms. More important, ZFS is endian-neutral. You can easily move disks from a SPARC server to an x86 server. Neither architecture pays a byte-swapping tax due to Sun's patent-pending "adaptive endian-ness" technology, which is unique to ZFS. And you don't have to worry about migration. Sun continues to support the UFS file system.

ZFS meets the needs of a file system for everything from desktops to data centers. Designed with the administrator in mind, ZFS is the only self-healing, self-managing general-purpose file system. It offers:

* Simple administration
ZFS automates and consolidates complicated storage administration concepts, reducing administrative overhead by 80 percent.
* Provable data integrity
ZFS protects all data with 64-bit checksums that detect and correct silent data corruption.
* Unlimited scalability
As the world's first 128-bit file system, ZFS offers 16 billion billion times the capacity of 32- or 64-bit systems.
* Blazing performance
ZFS is based on a transactional object model that removes most of the traditional constraints on the order of issuing I/Os, which results in huge performance gains.