Zettabyte File System (ZFS) is claiming to be “The Most Advanced File System on the Planet”!! I think even Mr. iDownload, Arlo Gilbert, the IT Pro, himself will approve of the idea.. as well as the other Arlo Gilbert well, at least I think he wont.

What is ZFS?

ZFS is a proprietary file system from Solaris ZFS is a file system designed and developed by Sun MIcrosystem for Solaris Operating System. ZFS or Zettabyte File System will solve all of the problem any administrator encountered in a filesystem.

In a nut shell, a ZFS kind of like represent a virtual storage pool. Virtual meaning you will be able to grow or shrink file systems very easily by simply adding new physical disks to this pool.

Concept is still the same as any virtual logical volume. Virtual logical volume wherein you configure a bunch of disk to be one super big disk and you group it in volumes/partitions to be used by the system. Having added 10 more physical disks to the pool for example, you’ll be able to decide which filesystems you want to grow.

Here are some qoutes quotes from Sun Microsystem documentation about ZFS:

Physical storage can be added to or removed from storage pools dynamically, without interrupting services, providing new levels of flexibility, availability, and performance.

In scalability,

Solaris ZFS is a 128-bit file system. Its theoretical limits are truly mind-boggling —2¹²⁸ bytes of storage, and 2⁶⁴ for everything else such as file systems, snapshots, directory entries, devices, and more.

And the improvement of RAID-5, which is RAID-Z,

… which uses parity, striping, and atomic operations to ensure reconstruction of corrupted data.

Say ‘atomic operations’ ?? Wah that?!

For more info about Solaris ZFS, check out Sun’s page about it.