Feature Story

October 25, 2007 -- Most system administrators take the limitations of current file systems in stride. After all, we all know that file systems are vulnerable to data corruption, brutal to manage, and excruciatingly slow.

ZFS, the dynamic, free, open-source file system in the Solaris Operating System (OS), will make you forget everything you thought you knew about file systems. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it's a fundamentally new approach to data management that creates a blissfully simple storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.

With common storage pools, unlimited capacity, provable data integrity, blazing performance, and near-zero administration, it's no wonder InfoWorld is calling ZFS "close to perfect."

Available with the Solaris Operating System

Moreover, ZFS is included with free and open-source Solaris code, and available on all Solaris 10 OS-supported platforms. All existing applications will run with ZFS, and it complements Sun's storage management portfolio, including Sun StorageTek 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."

For example, ZFS replaces the file system/volume manager model and thus eliminates the need for costly workarounds, such as volume manager software, disk striping, and mirroring. ZFS also eases administration by removing the constraints associated with directories and subdirectories, letting administrators virtualize disks and manage data across physical volumes.

ZFS is supported on nearly 1000 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 "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.

The Industry's Only Self-Healing, Self-Managing File System

ZFS meets the needs of a file system for everything from desktops to datacenters. 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 up to 80%.
• Provable data integrity - ZFS protects all data with 256-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.

Just as it dramatically eases the suffering of system administrators, ZFS also offers relief for your bottom line. Because ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools (unlike traditional file systems that require a separate volume manager), creating and deleting file systems is far less complex. Not only does this eliminate the need to pay for volume manager licenses and allow for single support contracts, it lowers administration costs and increases storage utilization.

Get in the Pool

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 file systems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all file systems at all times.

Delivering Near-Zero Administration

ZFS does away with many complicated storage administration concepts and automates many common administrative chores. For example, creating a storage pool, growing a pool, or adding or removing a file system can all be done with a single, simple command--instead of the tedious multi-step process found in traditional file systems and volume managers.

For example, to create a pool, to create three file systems, and then to grow the pool--5 logical steps--5 simple ZFS commands are required, as opposed to 28 steps with a traditional file system and volume manager.

Moreover, these commands are all constant-time and complete in just a few seconds. Traditional file systems and volumes often take hours to configure. In the case above, ZFS reduces the time required to complete the tasks from 40 minutes to less than10 seconds.

ZFS' command-line interface drastically simplifies administration. It is task-oriented, letting administrators express the tasks they want to accomplish instead of having to memorize or look up cryptic commands.

"You don't have to worry about the details of what's going on with your disks, your storage, or your file systems," explains Bonwick. "You add disks to your storage pool, file systems consume space automatically as they need it, and administrators don't have to get involved.

Taking the Guesswork Out of Data Integrity

System errors and unexpected power outages can quickly lead to data corruption, but ZFS prevents corruption by keeping data self-consistent at all times. All operations are transactional. This not only maintains consistency but also removes almost all of the constraints on I/O order and allows changes to succeed or fail as a whole.

ZFS eliminates the need for administrators to run laborious recovery procedures, even if the system is shut down in an unclean fashion. Additionally, ZFS is the only file system that conducts end-to-end 64-bit checksums on all data to prevent silent data corruption. When any data is read, the checksum is verified to ensure that the data that the application wrote is what is returned.

What's more, ZFS can self-heal data in a mirrored or RAID configuration. When one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it via the checksum and uses another copy to repair it.

Creating Immense Capacity

As a 128-bit system, ZFS is designed to support more storage, more files, file systems, snapshots, and directory entries than can possibly be created in the foreseeable future. This level of scalability also enables you to dynamically add or remove storage from the storage pools without interrupting services. File systems grow and shrink automatically as users add or remove data.

Administrators can set quotas to limit space consumption and reservations to guarantee future availability of space. ZFS also provides compression to reduce disk space and I/O bandwidth requirements

Brilliantly Simple

ZFS enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general-purpose servers. It saves customers money and administrators time. If in fact it does become ubiquitous, we wouldn't be at all surprised.

Download Solaris ZFS for free today.