zfs in production

[Freddie Cash]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Eric W. Bates <ericx at ericx.net> wrote:

> Sorry to ask an obvious question... But what's the advantage to zfs?
>

There's plenty of information regarding ZFS available online.  :)

A very quick synopsis of the main features would be:
  - pooled storage setup, which can be easily expanded as needed, and is
available to all filesystems/volumes
  - built-in striping (RAID0), n-way mirroring (RAID1), raidz1 (modified
RAID5), raidz2 (modified RAID6)
  - copy-on-write, and transactional filesystem
  - posix-compliant filesystem layer, and block storage / volume manager
  - infinite, constant-time, in-filesystem snapshots (read-only)
  - snapshots can be promoted to clones (read/write)
  - clones can be promoted to separate filesystems
  - built-in compression
  - end-to-end data integrity using checksums

There's a whole bunch more to it than the above.  Once you start using
pooled storage for servers, it's really hard to go back to the old way of
slicing and partitioning and allocating specific amounts of storage to each
filesytem.  :)
-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com