Zetabyte Filesystem (ZFS) Released

[graphic7]

As of today, ZFS is now a part of the Solaris Express: Community Release b27a. ZFS, originally, was promised to be part of Solaris 10; however, the initial release had to be pushed back. We'll see ZFS integrated into Solaris 10 with the second update, that's probably due next year some time.

ZFS, without a doubt, is the most advanced filesystem -- definitely more advanced than XFS, JFS2, etc. ZFS is a full 128-bit filesystem that supports compression, and will give the Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) a run for it's money. Did I mention that since ZFS is part of OpenSolaris, so it's open source and free?

Hopefully, this will persuade more of you to give Solaris a try.

Dan Price, at OpenSolaris.org, has written a short demo in Flash that illustrates just how awesome ZFS is:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/basics/

Edit: I just finished downloading the SXCR b27a ISOs, myself, and I'm about to do an install on my i386 workstation.

The ISOs for SXCR b27a may be downloaded at
http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/Welcome.jsp?StoreId=7&PartDetailId=Sol-Express_b27-x86-SP-G-B&TransactionId=try

Be sure to check out your hardware is on the Hardware Compatibility List before doing an install:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/

 

[dduardo]

Who in there right mind needs a 128-bit filesystem? Did I miss the announcement concerning mainstream quantum computing?

From the demo it seems as if Sun has basically lumped a bunch of tools into one. It is nice from a management perspective, but how is the performance compared to say ReiserFS4?

 

[graphic7]

Who in there right mind needs a 128-bit filesystem? Did I miss the announcement concerning mainstream quantum computing?

From the demo it seems as if Sun has basically lumped a bunch of tools into one. It is nice from a management perspective, but how is the performance compared to say ReiserFS4?

Sun (or anyone else for that matter) has yet to do a benchmark between all the major filesystems. From the demo, though, you did see that 100 filesystems were created in 20 seconds.

Obviously, you're going to run into issues when you try to accruately benchmark a filesystem only available on Solaris, against filesystems that are only available on Linux, though. So, until ZFS gets ported to another platform (most likely to FreeBSD, as it can't be ported to Linux and officially integrated into the kernel sources), you won't have an accurate benchmark to cite.

Edit: I've talked with a few guys at Sun and a feature-wise comparison between XFS, Ext3, and ReiserFS3 (maybe 4) is on the way.