Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

When considering the present needs of most home users, Sun’s ZFS is no doubt overkill. Developed for Sun’s powerful Solaris operating environment, ZFS brings truly advanced filesystem technologies to the masses. For some background with respect to the benefits and capabilities that ZFS offers, I’d have to recommend an article I read today that briefly introduces ZFS. With recent versions of Mac OS X reportedly offering some degree of ZFS support, it will likely see increasing use on what can be considered typical home computers.

ZFS includes some remarkable features. It allows for absolutely massive filesystems, for instance. The idea of storage pools is quite useful for many large-scale applications. However, I think many of its features are excessive for the typical home user, at least at this point in time.

But a look back at the history of desktop computing shows that with time even the fastest and most capable systems eventually become virtually useless. When it comes to many business systems, however, this sort of technoloy will be a tremendous boon. Many business applications, especially those dealing with digital media files and scientific data, are already pushing existing filesystem technology to the limit. It’s no surprise to me that Sun would be the developer of such promising technology. They are no doubt fully aware of the difficult data management issues that many companies with huge amounts of data face on a daily basis.

One thing I find particularly interesting is ZFS’ support for snapshots. This is perhaps one of the features that may be most useful for the typical home user. Many years back I used OpenVMS, which has a filesystem that supports versioning. That is, each time a file is saved, a new copy is created, rather than overwriting or modifying the existing file data. It’s a feature that actually proves to be quite useful, especially when developing software or editing documents and images. It makes it very simple to view old versions of a file, without necessarily having to resort to the use of a version control system like Subversion or CVS.

It will be quite interesting to see how Apple manages to integrate the snapshot functionality of ZFS into their operating system. I think it will prove to be a very attractive feature. It brings a level of safety to file manipulation that really hasn’t been there in the past. And when we consider that most hard drives today in a typical home system offer hundreds of gigabytes of unused storage space, it makes perfect sense to use such space for saving potentially-valuable copies of files that are being modified by the user.

We should also note that other platforms may very well offer support for ZFS. The DraonFlyBSD project has considered a port of ZFS in the past, and the FreeBSD project has made some progress so far with their port. Thanks to the generosity of Sun, systems like FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD and Mac OS X will become all that much better. We are entering some very exciting times in the world of filesystems and data storage.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 11:57 pm and is filed under FreeBSD, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, Solaris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.