19-05-2017, 10:46 AM
ZFS - the Zettabyte file system - is a huge advance in the capacity of existing file systems. It provides more space for files, greatly improves administration and greatly improves data security.
It is available in Sun Solaris 10 and has been made open source. The advantages of ZFS seem so large that their use can be extended to other UNIX distributions and even, possibly and eventually, to Windows.
ZFS is a transactional file system, which means that the state of the file system is always consistent on the disk. Traditional file systems overwrite data, which means that if the system loses power, for example between the time a block of data is allocated and when it is linked to a directory, the file system will be in an inconsistent state . Historically, this problem was solved by using the fsck command. This command was responsible for checking and verifying the state of the file system and attempting to repair any inconsistencies during the process. This problem of inconsistent file systems caused great pain to administrators, and the fsck command was never guaranteed to solve all possible problems. More recently, file systems have introduced the concept of journaling. The journaling process logs the actions into a separate journal, which can then be played back safely if a system failure occurs. This process introduces an unnecessary overhead because the data must be written twice, which often results in a new set of problems, such as when the journal can not be reproduced correctly.
It is available in Sun Solaris 10 and has been made open source. The advantages of ZFS seem so large that their use can be extended to other UNIX distributions and even, possibly and eventually, to Windows.
ZFS is a transactional file system, which means that the state of the file system is always consistent on the disk. Traditional file systems overwrite data, which means that if the system loses power, for example between the time a block of data is allocated and when it is linked to a directory, the file system will be in an inconsistent state . Historically, this problem was solved by using the fsck command. This command was responsible for checking and verifying the state of the file system and attempting to repair any inconsistencies during the process. This problem of inconsistent file systems caused great pain to administrators, and the fsck command was never guaranteed to solve all possible problems. More recently, file systems have introduced the concept of journaling. The journaling process logs the actions into a separate journal, which can then be played back safely if a system failure occurs. This process introduces an unnecessary overhead because the data must be written twice, which often results in a new set of problems, such as when the journal can not be reproduced correctly.