Oracle ZFS is a proprietary
file system and
logical volume manager.
ZFS
ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an ope ...
is scalable, and includes extensive protection against
data corruption
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted. ...
, support for high storage capacities, efficient
data compression
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...
, integration of the concepts of
filesystem
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is Computer data storage, stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage me ...
and
volume management
In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, ...
,
snapshots and
copy-on-write
Copy-on-write (COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing or shadowing, is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources. If a resource is dupl ...
clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair,
RAID-Z
Although all RAID implementations differ from the specification to some extent, some companies and open-source projects have developed non-standard RAID implementations that differ substantially from the standard. Additionally, there are non-RAID ...
, native
NFSv4
Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. NFS, like ...
ACLs, and can be very precisely configured.
ZFS is a registered trademark belonging to Oracle.
History
Implementations
Solaris 10
In update 2 and later, ZFS is part of Sun's own Solaris 10 operating system and is thus available on both
SPARC
SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...
and
x86
x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...
-based systems.
Solaris 11
After Oracle's Solaris 11 Express release, the OS/Net consolidation (the main OS code) was made proprietary and closed-source, and further ZFS upgrades and implementations inside Solaris (such as encryption) are not compatible with other non-proprietary implementations which use previous versions of ZFS.
When creating a new ZFS pool, to retain the ability to use access the pool from other non-proprietary Solaris-based distributions, it is recommended to upgrade to Solaris 11 Express from OpenSolaris (snv_134b), and thereby stay at ZFS version 28.
Future development
On September 2, 2017,
Simon Phipps reported that Oracle had laid off virtually all of its Solaris core development staff, interpreting it as a sign that Oracle no longer intends to support future development of the platform.
Version history
References
External links
{{Solaris
Compression file systems
Disk file systems
Formerly free software
Oracle software
RAID
Volume manager