mukt.in and ZFS

I have returned from mukt.in a bit wiser. Mr. Raju Alluri from Sun Microsystems spoke about a new wave of innovation that promised to change the way the storage industry operated. ZFS- the new filesystem from Sun Microsystems. I was at my attentive best here. I began listening. ZFS presents a pool type storage (I didn’t know what this meant). He went on, “ZFS stores data as a pool and several filesystems, thousands, even more, can pull data from this pool”. Now I understand. The data speeds (I’m thinking I/O bandwidth, someone correct me if I understood wrong) are not limited to the speed of the individual device, in fact, the combined speed is available to pull data from this pool whatever be the device. WOW ! Then comes the shocker. ZFS allows one bloody exabyte as the max. file size ! Who has a file that large ? Then Mr. Alluri told us about the National Met. Org. in the US which has the largest db in the world. 300 Tb seemingly. Now met data gets constantly updated. A single backup is 300 TB, in a few years you could be touching a lot more. Again, you shouldn’t have problems trying to access the data. ZFS’s pool type system should make that possible.

I began thinking about incontiguous partitions that had been bugging us some time back. LVM is traditionally used to manage incontiguous partitions. But just imagine. With a pool type storage system, with filesystems accessing data from this pool directly, LVM might no longer be necessary at all ! And this is a big revolution !!!!!

Mr. Alluri then told us that ZFS was going to allow two operating systems to run side by side. I know this I thought. This is not a ZFS feature I thought. chroot allows me to do the same, I can install debian in gentoo etc. !

It turns out I am wrong again. ZFS will allow you to run two operating systems side by side all because of its pool type storage.

I am going to learn more about this excellent operating system over the next few weeks. I unfortunately cannot try ZFS as it is not supported on Linux and I have to learn about it only through wikipedia and other sources. MIT’s Athena Center has Solaris systems seemingly. Hopefully I’ll get to see ZFS in action there (if I make it).