OpenZFS Basics

ZFS was first released in 2005 and rebranded as OpenZFS in 2010. The original code has been ported to several platforms and is now available on Linux, OSX, FreeBSD, Illumos/Solaris, and was recently ported to Windows. The original design principles consisted of using pooled storage, transactional object model, end-to-end data integrity, and a simple but powerful administration model.

Although originally designed for the enterprise, OpenZFS has been used on everything from laptops to NAS servers and is now the foundation for many enterprise storage appliances. This talk will discuss the following aspects of ZFS:

• pooled storage
• always consistent on-disk state (no fsck)
• snapshot and clones
• end-to-end data integrity
• self-healing features
• built-in redundancy
• scalable design
• dynamic striping
• variable blocksizes
• builtin replication, compression, and encryption
• administration model