Sun Microsystems makes new releases of Solaris about every four to six months, in many cases all the new release contains is bug fixes and some changes in functionality. More often than not most releases go by without a great deal of fanfare. Just as Solaris 10 3/05 broke new ground with Zones, Dtrace and the Service Management Facility. Solaris 10 6/06 introduces ZFS or Zettabyte File System and the SATA framework and Xorg 6.9, which will be the primary focus of this review.
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Member since:2005-07-14
I think ZFS offers completely end-to-end integrated seamless tools, while LVM+whateverFS requires that you manage by hand many things, using tons of pvcreate, vgcreate, lvcreate, mkfs, etc. instead of just 2 commands in ZFS.
BTW LVM can't do RAID-4 or RAID-5, and overall LVM performance sucks(especially snapshots slow down the disk performance enormously).
Member since:2005-07-08
My AIX skills are a little rusty but if I am not mistaken you cannot create a RAID 5 array using the AIX LVM, only RAID 0 (stripes) or RAID 1 (mirrors). You either have to use a hardware based solution or use Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) in order to do it in software. Either way it makes an expensive solution if you want fault tolerant storage and that still does not address ZFS' capability for snapshots, which comes at no extra cost.
Member since:
2006-01-05
Maybe I need to do some more reading or something, but I still don't see what all the fuss is about ZFS. I'm most familiar with the volume managers from Linux (LVM2, EVMS) and AIX (LVM) and their associated filesystems (EXT3, reiser, JFS, JFS2, etc.) and I guess I don't see what ZFS can do that the right combination of those technologies can't. Can someone give me a quick rundown of why ZFS is better than LVM2+Reiser or AIX LVM+JFS2?