Understanding the Zettabyte File System for Hard Disks

ZFS is built on Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86 (as is used with todays Intel Core 2 Duo processors), data can be exchanged between the two architectures. In addition, the operation of complex data to store information in a manner consistent between the Big-Endian and Little-Endian, an advantage on how to store data, if earlier binding. Each block of data is written in the native system of writing the data during playback if the Big-Endian does not include data are converted into memory and then written to the corresponding system.

Although Sun did not make it possible to adapt ZFS for Linux, nothing has been presented so far (note that the inclusion of ZFS in the kernel implies a change of license, the CDDL license first is incompatible with the GNU GPL second). There is a port for Fuse / Linux which is in the beta. Currently, there are no plans for HP-UX, or AIX. But since ZFS is open source, the port can be done without the participation of Sun. Matt Dillon DragonflyBSD project has already planned to bring ZFS for version 1.5 of its Operating System.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Apple Inc. currently allows people to read-only access to the contents of a ZFS partition. Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard (optimized for extra performance on Intel Core 2 Duo / Quad-core and Nehalem processors), will, on the server, support reading and writing to ZFS volumes.

ZFS is also supported on FreeBSD, the port is almost finished, ZFS partitions can be assembled, disassembled, read and written. Only the lack of ACL support that will be implemented in the next few weeks.

To access a ZFS partition from Windows, you can download and install SFU and share the partition via NFS (Unix Services for Windows).

ZFS File System for Z, is a file system with an open source CDDL license. The 'Z' does nothing special but is officially known in the press under different names such as Zettabyte, concerning the storage of data, but also ZFS for the last word in file systems.

Produced by Sun Microsystems for Solaris 10 and above, it was designed by the team of Jeff Bonwick. Announced in September 2004, it was integrated into Solaris 31 October 2005 and 16 November 2005 as a feature of the build 27 of OpenSolaris. Sun has announced that ZFS was integrated into the updated Solaris dated June 2006, one year after the opening of the OpenSolaris community.

The characteristics of the file system are its high storage capacity, the integration of all previous concepts on file systems and volume management into a single product. It incorporates the structure On-Disk, it is lightweight and easily allows the establishment of a platform for storage management. It also sports excellent defragmentation systems which prevents the hard disk from getting fragmented easily.