Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Monday November 27, 2006

ZFS reliability to the rescue of the Centers for Disease Control

I've recently been working with a customer as part of my new job (which I guess I should blog about someday) on how ZFS can work in their environment. In the process, I got a bit more in depth with zfs than I'd had opportunity to before, and had joined the OpenSolaris zfs-discuss mailing list.

So this evening, when going through the days email, reading and deleting, I came across this posting.

Apparently, the CDC had started to use ZFS in production and through it's normal use, ZFS found that their SAN equipment was doing exactly what ZFS states as the filesystem problem: every layer (erroneously) trusts every other layer, regardless of which way the data is flowing.

I don't even remember the name of the offering, but I do recall from some years ago Oracle and EMC (I think?) having an offering that allowed Oracle to checksum the data written to the tablespaces. It was insanely expensive and really only appropriate for the most mission critical environments as a result.

Fast forward several years, and now with zfs, I have the same level of reliability with the junk in my home directory on my laptop. To quote the post: "Another win for ZFS"...

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