One of the most popular file systems , originally developed at Sun Microsystems operating system Solaris, transferred to other platforms which caused a surge diametrically different emotions developers from violent admiration and jubilation to the opposite – anger and rage.
Let’s try to get acquainted with the point of view of each party , as well as the reasons for the existence of such a polar assessment of the file system . But before we do, let’s at least in general terms, take a look at its features and characteristics:
• 128 -bit file system that provides the ability to store virtually unlimited amounts of information . In practice, this means that ZFS can theoretically store data volumes that exceed today’s technological capabilities , provided the use of this approach to data warehousing .
• A lot of attention is paid to the integrity and reliability of storage as user data and metadata FS , used for this advanced hashing algorithms .
• Support snapshot (snapshot) and storage pool (storage pools), so ZFS combines the capabilities of the file system and volume management ( a new concept of storage- pools ).
• Traditionally, ZFS – is enough file system performance . However, this statement is sometimes questioned. At a minimum, specific figures are highly dependent on the type of problem , which is made like a comparative performance testing .
• Opportunities for selective compression and / or encryption of individual files or file systems.
• Support for automatic recognition and association (exceptions ) duplicate files .
• ZFS does not support quotas . Or rather , its support quotas somewhat peculiar : the concept of ” quota allocation ” in the terminology of ZFS means that you limit the size of the created file system . The design of the system is that each user ZFS should be allocated its own file system with all the attendant restrictions.
• Certain problems are not technical feature creates FS – incompatible with the GPL license code (CDDL).
• To show ZFS innovation not only in the field of technical solutions give , as an example, the ability to manage the basic features of PS via the web interface .
• And much, much more , because , ZFS is extremely large in its capabilities and features , and to list them is simply not possible .
Of course, if we look at these features separately , they are largely not new and are found in some form in other file systems , but that a single set of these additional features first introduced only in ZFS, which is what makes it so unique and interesting on this moment.