ZFS

Posted Mar 20, 2007 8:06 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670)
In reply to: Gee that's tough. by drag
Parent article: The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

I don't think that is the main thing ZFS brings. Of course, for Solaris admins, the main thing is that ZFS brings logical volume-type functionality which was badly missing from vanilla Solaris before.

But to me from a Linux background, it brings 1) much better snapshot capabilities (more of them with better performance) due to it being copy-on-write at the file system level, 2) checksummed data integrity (I haven't seen this elsewhere but I suspect this is great for running low end storage systems such as software RAID) and 3) better performing software raid-5 ("raid-z") because of its knowledge how the files are laid out.

I like ZFS. I haven't used it in production (and probably won't, at my current work), but it is a solid piece of engineering. It seems a bit bastardized at first as it is both a file system and a volume manager, but I think it is well motivated.