Solaris 10 Zfs Essentials
Scott Watanabe
- New Jersey Prentice Hall 2010
- 124 p. 24 cm.
Includes index
The ZFS file system offers a dramatic advance in data management with an innovative approach to data integrity, tremendous performance improvements, and a welcome integration of file system and volume management capabilities. The centerpiece of this new architecture is the concept of a virtual storage pool, which decouples the file system from physical storage in the same way that virtual memory abstracts the address space from physical memory, allowing for much more efficient use of storage devices.
In ZFS, space is shared dynamically between multiple file systems from a single storage pool and is parceled out from the pool as file systems request it. Physical storage can therefore be added to storage pools dynamically, without interrupting services. This provides new levels of flexibility, availability, and performance. Because ZFS is a 128-bit file system, its theoretical limits are truly mind-boggling–2128 bytes of storage and 264 for everything else, including file systems, snapshots, directory entries, devices, and more.