
When it comes to dealing with storage, Solaris 10 provides admins with more choices than any other operating system. Right out of the box, it offers two filesystems, two volume managers, an iscsi target and initiator, and, naturally, an NFS server. Add a couple of Sun packages and you have volume replication, a cluster filesystem, and a hierarchical storage manager. Trust your data to the still-in-development features found in OpenSolaris, and you can have a fibre channel target and an in-kernel CIFS server, among other things. True, some of these features can be found in any enterprise-ready UNIX OS. But Solaris 10 integrates all of them into one well-tested package.
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Member since:
2005-07-11
It's not just one developer aesthetic opinion. Layered design is superior to monolithic design.
ZFS is good, but layered ZFS would be better, for many reasons. Can ZFS do reiserfs over LVM over RAID over NFS, SMB and gmailfs?
From my brief readings on ZFS, you can add remote block devices into the zpool. You can create zraid volumes from the pool. And you can export volumes in such a way that you can put other FS on top. What's so different?
You have a FS, on top of a volume, on top of a RAID, on top of storage devices.
ZFS is not just a filesystem. It is a storage management system that includes device management, volume management, raid management, pooled storage, and a 128-bit filesystem on top of all that.
Please, no. Something architectural like this should not be GPL'd. It should be licensed in such a way that anyone can take it and built upon it (BSD, MIT, X11, LGPL, whatever).
The GPL is great for applications. But lower-level, libraries, architectural stuff should not be GPL'd. Otherwise you get every Tom, Dick, And Harry Co writing their own (usually) incompatible version of the same.
How many more layers do you need?