Saturday November 19, 2005

I downloaded the latest Solaris build from OpenSolaris.org - Nevada build B27 - when you boot it, it calls itself Solaris 11. I have to admit that I hadn't been paying as much attention to the ZFS filesystem as I should have. I finally read through the slides and some of the other documentation, and I really got jazzed. In past lives I have been a Unix SysAdmin, and fussing with filesystems was the #1 pain in the ass (remember ncheck, dcheck and fsdb?). I couldn't believe that ZFS could be as easy and powerful as the documentation said it was, so yesterday I scrounged up a couple of extra drives, slapped them in my Opteron box, and took it out for a spin. Wow. It is that easy. Putting together a raid array is truly a one-liner. Try the experiment yourself. I spent way more time plugging in the SATA drives than I did in turning them into a RAIDZ array. It's got one cool feature after another, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be the ability to atomically, at low cost, and transaction-aware, create a file system snapshot. Between being an interesting way to do versioning and backups of live systems, it's just way too cool for words. Hats off to Jeff Bonwick and the rest of the ZFS team. Permalink Comments [3]