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One of the interesting message from the Open Storage Summit EMEA 2012 is that (for Nexenta and other several companies/organizations) the ZFS if probably the perfect filesystem for storage systems. For Nexenta this is a core part of their NexentaStor solution and products and their are still thinking that is (also today) the best choice.

But what is ZFS? It’s a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems on 2005 for OpenSolaris. One really interesting aspect is that ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), and this make possible re-use this code (with some limitations) also in other projects.

Features list is quite impressive and we can summarize in:

  • 128-bits filesystem (most are still a 64-bits)
  • max file and volume size:  2^64 bytes (16 Exabytes)
  • max number of files: 2^48
  • different layers of disk cache to speed up read and write operations
  • 256 bit checksums end-to-end to validate data stored under its protection
  • no need of fsck because ZFS data are always consistent on disk
  • compression, also at file level
  • unconstrained architecture
  • copy-on-write transactional object model
  • variable-sized blocks of up to 128 kilobytes.

For more information see also:

 

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.