solaris-zfs0 pages

ORACLE DATA SHEET
ORACLE SOLARIS ZFS
A BETTER SAFER WAY TO MANAGE
YOUR DATA
KEY FEATURES
• No silent data corruption ever. The
Oracle Solaris ZFS self healing feature
automatically repairs corrupt data.
• Rock-solid data integrity. All data is
protected by 256-bit checksums and
data consistency is maintained at all
times.
• Mind-boggling scalability: 128-bit file
system, 16 billion billion times the
capacity of 32- or 64-bit file systems
• Breathtaking speed: proven cutting edge
technologies combine to optimize
performance.
• Near-zero administration: complicated
storage administration is automated and
simplified, reducing administrative
overhead by up to 80%
• Built-in data services: encryption,
compression, deduplication, infinite
snapshots, clones, replication,
• Seamless integration of data
management protocols, including NFS,
CIFS, and iSCSI.
Anyone who has ever lost important files, run out of space on a partition, spent
weekends adding new storage to servers, tried to grow or shrink a file system,
or experienced data corruption knows that there is room for improvement in file
systems and volume managers. Oracle Solaris ZFS is designed from the ground
up to meet the emerging needs of a general-purpose local file system that spans
the desktop to the data center.
The Future-Proof File System
Oracle Solaris ZFS offers a dramatic advance in data management with an innovative
approach to data integrity, near-zero administration, 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 physical memory, allowing for much more efficient and
flexible use of storage devices. In Oracle Solaris ZFS, space is shared dynamically among
multiple file systems from a single storage pool and is parceled out of the pool as file systems
request it. Physical storage can be added to storage pools dynamically without interrupting
services, providing new levels of flexibility, availability, and performance. And in terms of
scalability, the theoretical limits of the 128-bit ZFS address space are truly mind-boggling: 16
exabytes (16!10 raised to the power of 18 bytes) being the maximum size of a single file.
Oracle Solaris ZFS implements an improvement on RAID-5, RAID-Z3, which uses parity,
striping, and atomic operations to ensure reconstruction of corrupted data even in the face of
three concurrent drive failures. It is ideally suited for managing industry standard storage
servers.
Cutting-Edge Data Integrity
Oracle Solaris ZFS combines proven and cutting-edge technologies, such as copy-on-write
and end-to-end checksumming. Data is always written to a new block on disk before changing
the pointers to the data and committing the write. And, because the file system is always
consistent, time-consuming recovery procedures like fsck are not required, even if the system
is shut down in an unclean manner. Copy-on-write also enables administrators to take
consistent backups or roll data back to a known point in time.
Oracle Solaris with Oracle Solaris ZFS is the only known operating system designed to
provide end-to-end checksumming for all data. Oracle Solaris ZFS constantly reads and
checks data to help ensure that it is correct, and if it detects an error in a mirrored pool, the
technology can automatically repair the corrupt data. This relentless vigilance on behalf of
availability protects against costly and time-consuming data loss (even previously
undetectable silent data corruption).
High Performance
This radical new architecture optimizes and simplifies code paths from the application to the
hardware, producing sustained throughput at exceptional speeds. New block allocation