{"id":633,"date":"2010-05-20T12:57:55","date_gmt":"2010-05-20T19:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=633"},"modified":"2010-07-08T13:06:31","modified_gmt":"2010-07-08T20:06:31","slug":"zfs-why-you-should-care-about-zfs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=633","title":{"rendered":"ZFS?  Why you should care about ZFS?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/zfs_logo.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-640\" title=\"zfs_logo\" src=\"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/zfs_logo-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"zfs_logo\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>There&#8217;s a lot of buzz about the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ZFS\">Zettabyte File System<\/a> from <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">Sun<\/span> Oracle, which has been included for a while in both Solaris and OpenSolaris.\u00a0 (Distributions based on Opensolaris like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nexenta.org\/\">Nexenta<\/a> have it.\u00a0 Also some BSD distributions have it).<\/p>\n<p>In general, file systems are not exactly glamorous.\u00a0 HFS?\u00a0 UFS? VxVM?\u00a0 Who cares.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a file system, right?<\/p>\n<p>ZFS has some serious juicy goodness.\u00a0 Personally, I think as time goes on, you&#8217;ll see more and more ZFS (or at least ZFS-like file systems) used on production servers, especially file servers.\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nexenta.com\/corp\/\">Like NexentaStor<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->One of the things I like best about ZFS is that the developers worked hard to make it easy to use.\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sun.com\/bigadmin\/features\/articles\/zfs_part1.scalable.jsp\">ZFS is a combination of file system and volume manager<\/a>. \u00a0 What this means is that ZFS in dead simple to administer.\u00a0 Most commands are one liners, and take the place of what would have been whole strings of commands with other volume managers.<\/p>\n<p>Believe it or not, most file systems *DO NOT* actually detect or repair <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sun.com\/bigadmin\/content\/submitted\/data_rot.jsp\">&#8220;bit rot&#8221;<\/a>.\u00a0 Hopefully you have underlying hardware like a RAID controller to handle that.\u00a0 Even if you do, all it usually does is perhaps complain about &#8220;corruption detected&#8221;.\u00a0 Bits flip and files get whacked more often than you think.\u00a0 Not with ZFS.\u00a0 ZFS uses elaborate checksumming to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/blog\/storage\/zfs-data-integrity-tested\/811\">detect and repair problems<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Along similar lines, ZFS has atomic writes.\u00a0 Either something is written to disk correctly, or it is not written at all.\u00a0 You see high end databases like this, but not file systems.\u00a0 What this means is that you can literally pull the plug on a server during a big write, and the file system stays intact.\u00a0 No more fsck!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tech-recipes.com\/rx\/1446\/zfs_ten_reasons_to_reformat_your_hard_drives\/\">Here&#8217;s ten reasons to reformat your hard drives<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a lot of buzz about the Zettabyte File System from Sun Oracle, which has been included for a while in both Solaris and OpenSolaris.\u00a0 (Distributions based on Opensolaris like Nexenta have it.\u00a0 Also some BSD distributions have it). In&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=633\" class=\"more-link\">Continue Reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":644,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions\/644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}