Sun Gilds Solaris Lily
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Oct 2006 20:56 UTC
Sun Solaris, OpenSolaris "When eWEEK Labs first reviewed Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 early last year, we were impressed by the new facilities the operating system offered for better serving up applications and making the most of the SPARC and x86 hardware on which it runs. With this summer's Solaris 10 update, labeled 6/06, Sun has significantly improved on its already excellent operating system with the addition of the much-heralded Zettabyte File System."
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RE[3]: ZFS vs. LVM+JFS2
by whartung on Wed 25th Oct 2006 17:00 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: ZFS vs. LVM+JFS2"
whartung
Member since:
2005-07-06

#3, the integrity checking, is very important as it helps detect "silent" corruption happening on a disk drive, say from a flaky controller, and gives the system opportunities for correction, but minimally it provides notification. Effectively, ZFS is running and tracking checksums at the block level.

The more front facing benefit from an admin point of view is simply that the ZFS command line is REALLY simple and easy to use. It's well documented, and almost "intuitive".

To be fair, this is "syntactic sugar", and the IBM admin app (I forget the name not have touched AIX in over 10 years) is certainly easy to use from a "green screen", Curses style application, but from the command line it's not as clean and clear as the ZFS command line. And compared to the de facto VERITAS system that ZFS will most likely place in large scale use, the interface is simply night and day.

I'm really hoping that Apple is looking at ZFS VERY seriously, because I have great confidence that they can make an admin tool and leverage ZFS capabilities to push it to the next level of making it a consumer friendly file system. The "adding a stick of RAM" analogy is very apt to how disk pools are managed, and I think there's great value for consumers to be able to convert a 100G volume in to a contiguous 200G volume with simply slapping in a new hard drive.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[4]: ZFS vs. LVM+JFS2
by chicklin on Wed 25th Oct 2006 17:50 in reply to "RE[3]: ZFS vs. LVM+JFS2"
chicklin Member since:
2006-01-05

> To be fair, this is "syntactic sugar", and the IBM admin app (I forget the name not have touched AIX in over 10 years) is certainly easy to use from a "green screen", Curses style application, but from the command line it's not as clean and clear as the ZFS command line.

SMIT (Systems Management Interface Tool, I think)

> ...I think there's great value for consumers to be able to convert a 100G volume in to a contiguous 200G volume with simply slapping in a new hard drive.

True, but there's also a lot of danger in it as well. It might give many home users a false sense of security..."I have two drives so it's okay if one fails"

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[5]: ZFS vs. LVM+JFS2
by taos on Thu 26th Oct 2006 00:24 in reply to "RE[4]: ZFS vs. LVM+JFS2"
taos Member since:
2005-11-16

Chicklin,

I know both LVM/JFS(2) and ZFS, for me, the most significant features of ZFS are:

1) End-to-End Data Integrity.
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_data

2) Lightweight and near-zero-administration filesystems.

On the other hand, LVM/JFS2 has this most significant advantage: Predictable performance.

This is first due to non-COW (most other FS) v.s. COW (copy-on-write, like zfs).

Also, when you add a disk to a VG, you still have the control over how to use the disk for differnt LV/FS, whereas adding a disk to a zfs pool is really like adding a memory stick to the system.
Unfortunately, disk is not the same as memory, yet.
The difference in 'seek latency' is day and night.

There're many other differences, having different significance for different people.
It's all about "architectural choices and trade-offs".

Reply Parent Score: 0