ZFS - A new approach new system

A file system used by OpenSolaris provides simple adminstration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.

ZFS Features:

• Pooled Storage Model
• Always consistent state
• Protection from data corruption
• Live data scrubbing
• Instantaneous snapshots and clones
• Fast native back up and restore
• Higly scalable
• Buit in compression
• Simplified adminstration model

Lets see what it means

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 filesystems at all times.

All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS file system, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it and uses another copy to repair it.

ZFS introduces a new data replication model called RAID-Z. It is similar to RAID-5 but uses variable stripe width to eliminate the RAID-5 write hole (stripe corruption due to loss of power between data and parity updates). All RAID-Z writes are full-stripe writes. There's no read-modify-write tax, no write hole, and — the best part — no need for NVRAM in hardware. ZFS loves cheap disks.

ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem, while a clone is a writable copy of a snapshot. Clones provide an extremely space-efficient way to store many copies of mostly-shared data such as workspaces, software installations, and diskless clients.

ZFS backup and restore are powered by snapshots. Any snapshot can generate a full backup, and any pair of snapshots can generate an incremental backup. Incremental backups are so efficient that they can be used for remote replication — e.g. to transmit an incremental update every 10 seconds.

There are in ZFS. You can have as many files as you want; full 64-bit file offsets; unlimited links, directory entries, snapshots, and so on.

ZFS provides built-in compression. In addition to reducing space usage by 2-3x, compression also reduces the amount of I/O by 2-3x. For this reason, enabling compression actually makes some workloads go faster.

In addition to file systems, ZFS storage pools can provide volumes for applications that need raw-device semantics. ZFS volumes can be used as swap devices, for example. And if you enable compression on a swap volume, you now have compressed virtual memory.

New Os : Opensolaris

When we talk about os the first thing come to mind is windows unless and untill you are open source geek. For such geek the fist answer is Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora , Centos etc...).

When some one say about Solaris we feel not for the normal user. But thats not the fact now. Opensolaris 2009.06 is very user friendly with some nice features beating other very hard.

It has a simple graphical interface like gnome as its to built on Unix. It is also available on Live CD which means you can simply use it without installing (like ubuntu).

The main fetaures or points that make it ousstanding are :

1. Aguided Code base

2. ZFS

3. DTrace

4. Stability and backward comaptibility

5. Software Support

6. Image

It comes with firefox , thunder bird , Net beans and many other.

To download click here.

To view screenshots jst google in images with opensolaris.

For more details log in to opensolaris.org