Wednesday, March 11, 2009

ZFS - modern filesystem

I've banged on about Isilon in the past and it still seems like the best commercial solution for people who need large storage pools that are 110% reliable with predictable/scalable performance and a single mount-point (if necessary) that can grow dynamically without impacting the end users.
Given that NTFS and HFS are both looking a bit elderly now (and NTFS in Vista even more so) and the world needs a contemporary file-system that goes beyond what we needed back in the days of FAT16. The good news is that ZFS is supported fully in OS-X 10.6 server and so it may be the case that we see very Isilon-like storage pools built from more commodity hardware. If you're interested then the Wikipedia article (link in the title) gives a good overview of ZFS's zpools (their virtual volume construct) - they are analogous to Isilon's nodes.
Anyway - a superb into is to be had with this podcast featuring the guys from Sun.

2 comments:

Randal L. Schwartz said...

Thanks for linking to our FLOSS Weekly podcast featuring ZFS and the guys from Sun!

Anonymous said...

TWIT rocks

-Kevin