Posts Tagged 'filesystems'

soon ZFS under Linux

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Category: Storage

Published on Sunday, 18 June 2006 20:34

Written by Administrator

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I am still testing my NAS system (seven 300Gb disks) and while testing OpenSolaris (under Belenix), and Googling I found that page:

This blog is about the Google Summer of Code project "ZFS filesystem for FUSE/Linux"

For all of You that do not know what FUSE is, FUSE is the Filesystem in Userspace Linux kernel module. This module allows nonprivileged users to create their own filesystems without writing any kernel code.

While ZFS has many features which can benefit all kinds of users - from the simple end-user to the biggest enterprise systems:

• Provable integrity - it checksums all data (and meta-data), which makes it possible to detect hardware errors (hard disk corruption, flaky IDE cables..). 
• Atomic updates - means that the on-disk state is consistent at all times, there's no need to perform a lengthy filesystem check after forced reboots/power failures.
• Instantaneous snapshots and clones - it makes it possible to have hourly, daily and weekly backups efficiently, as well as experiment with new system configurations without any risks.
• Built-in compression, encryption
• Highly scalable
• Pooled storage model - creating filesystems is as easy as creating a new directory. You can efficiently have thousands of filesystems, each with it's own quotas and reservations, and different properties (compression algorithm, checksum algorithm, etc..).
• Built-in stripes (RAID-0), mirrors (RAID-1) and RAID-Z (it's like software RAID-5, but more efficient due to ZFS's copy-on-write transactional model). 
  
• Variable sector sizes, adaptive endianness etc...

In fact this is a sponsored Google summer of code project. Note that Apple is also currently porting ZFS under OS-X. That could mean that ZFS could be mainstream in a future not far away than 2 years.

• Google SoC Application Proposal (PDF)
• Deadline: August 21st, 2006
  

And I expect to test RAID-Z...For those interested by RAID-Z raw performances, You can read this highly technical blog entry: WHEN TO (AND NOT TO) USE RAID-Z

Sun expect to have a stable ZFS version by June 2006.