ZFS

The ZFS is a computer file system. FS stands for file system. The letter Z was chosen, because it is the last letter in the English alphabet. This is supposed to mean ZFS was the last, “ultimate” file system ever made.

Development

Originally ZFS has been developed by Sun Microsystems for Solaris. Later, ZFS has been ported to other versions of Unix, including Linux and FreeBSD.

Design

Traditional file systems focus on managing data and ensuring integrity. Additional features like RAID had to be added externally, outside of the file system’s realm. This potentially led to difficulties and increased complexity of systems.

The ZFS takes a different approach. It integrates many useful features into its ecosystem. This ensures all subsystems work together without problems and increases performance.

Some features include

• disk encryption
• RAID
• logical volume management
• snapshots
• data deduplication
• delegating file system administration rights

Furthermore, during development of ZFS there was a continuing trend to disks having larger capacities. In designing of ZFS it was taken account of that fact. The ZFS can handle (in comparison to traditional file systems) very large files, a large number of files, large number of disks, disks having large capacities, and so on.

Application

FreeBSD and Solaris use ZFS as the standard main file system. Ubuntu’s kernel includes ZFS, but it is not the default choice.