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During a presentation Wednesday in Washington, D.C., Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said his company's open-source file system, ZFS (Zettabyte File System), will be introduced into Mac OS X [with the release of OS X 10.5].
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In this video, Bill Moore (Lead ZFS Engineer at Sun) introduces ZFS and describes how ZFS provides provable data integrity for disk storage and shows how ZFS allows immense storage capacity to any OS which implements ZFS.
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Creating Immense Capacity
Sun engineers wondered if the 64-bit capabilities of current file systems will continue to suffice over the next 10 to 20 years. Their answer was no. If Moore's Law holds, in 10 to 15 years people will need a 65th bit. As a 128-bit system, ZFS is designed to support more storage, more file systems, more snapshots, more directory entries, and more files than can possibly be created in the foreseeable future.
This scalability also means that storage can be dynamically added to or removed from storage pools without interrupting services, providing new levels of flexibility and availability for globally accessed application services.
To efficiently use all of this capacity, file systems grow and shrink automatically as users add or remove data. Administrators can set quotas to limit space consumption and reservations to guarantee future availability of space. ZFS also provides compression to reduce disk space and I/O bandwidth requirements.
Logically, the next question is if ZFS' 128 bits is enough. According to Bonwick, it has to be. "Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans."
[NOTE: for more info on the "boiling the oceans" comment, see http://www.hodulik.com/2006/12/18/boiling-the-oceans/]
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What is ZFS and how will this affect my disk storage?
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In computing, ZFS is a file system (a method of arranging data on computer storage) originally created by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System. It features high capacity, the integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, a novel on-disk structure, lightweight instances, and easy storage pool management. ZFS is implemented as open source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
The ZFS will provide for disk storage which is/will provide:
- Always-valid on-disk state
- Consistent, reliable backups
- Data rollback to known point in time
- Dynamic striping across all devices to maximize throughput
- Copy-on-write design makes most disk writes sequential
- Multiple block sizes, automatically chosen to match workload
- Explicit I/O priority with deadline scheduling
- Globally optimal I/O sorting and aggregation
- Multiple independent prefetch streams with automatic length and stride detection
- Unlimited, instantaneous read/write snapshots
- Parallel, constant-time directory operations
Or, more simple ZFS delivers virtually unlimited disk storage capacity, provable data integrity, and near-zero administration.
...More details about ZFS: