UNIX File System (UFS)

The UNIX File System (UFS) is the primary file system for the Solaris Operating System. UFS is extremely mature, very stable, and for most applications is the file system of choice. The Solaris UFS has its roots in the Berkeley Fast File System (FFS) of the 1980s; today's file system is the result of more than 20 years of enhancement, evolution, and stabilization. Enhancements over the last several Solaris releases include metadata logging to improve both reliability and performance. For example, under the metadata-intensive PostMark benchmark, logging provides a 300-percent improvement on nonlogging transaction rates. Significant improvements have also been made to improve I/O performance for databases, provide fast access to directories with large numbers of files, and provide the ability to create multiterabyte file systems.

• White Paper: File System Performance: The Solaris OS, UFS, Linux ext3, and ReiserFS

Solaris Volume Manager

Solaris Volume Manager is a robust disk and storage management solution suitable for enterprise-class deployment. It can be used to pool storage elements into volumes and allocate them to applications; redundancy and failover capabilities can help provide continuous data access even in the event of a device failure. With an easy-to-use interface, the software allows many operations—such as recovering volumes or expanding the size of a file system—to occur online, minimizing the need for costly downtime. Recent enhancements to Solaris Volume Manager include support for multiterabyte volumes, cluster volume manager, and thousands of partitions per physical disk.

• White Paper: Transitioning to Solaris Volume Manager

Network File System, Version 4 (NFS V4)

The Network File System (NFS) was developed by Sun and introduced in the mid-80s as one of the first and most successful examples of open network file sharing. Version 4 is the latest NFS release and is designed to be both vendor neutral and operating system-type neutral. NFS V4 integrates file access, file locking, and mount protocols into a single, unified protocol to ease traversal through a firewall and to improve security. The Solaris implementation of NFS V4 is fully integrated with Kerberos V5, thus providing authentication, integrity, and privacy and enabling servers to offer different security flavors for different file systems. The Solaris implementation also includes delegation, enabling the server to delegate the management of a file to a client and reducing the number of round-trip operations required. In addition, the protocol includes operation compounding, which allows multiple operations to be combined into a single "over-the-wire" request.

Solaris ZFS

Solaris ZFS, available in Solaris 10, delivers ground-breaking file system capabilities by automating common administrative tasks, protecting data from corruption, and providing virtually unlimited scalability. Solaris ZFS uses virtual storage pools to make it easy to expand or contract file systems simply by adding more drives. Solaris ZFS will significantly reduce costs by streamlining storage administration and allowing resources to be shared among file systems. The time required to perform some functions will be reduced by orders of magnitude—from hours to just seconds.

Near-Zero Administration
With Solaris ZFS, complicated storage administration concepts are automated and consolidated into straightforward language, reducing administrative overhead by up to 80 percent. Administering storage with Solaris ZFS is extremely easy because the design eliminates many complicated administration concepts entirely. It enables administrators to state the intent of their storage policies rather than all of the details needed to implement them. For example, to add mirrored file systems for three users and then add more disks, Solaris ZFS reduces the number of tasks from 28 to five-—and the time required is cut from 40 minutes to 10 seconds.

In addition Solaris ZFS has been integrated with the Solaris Containers technology allowing container administrators to take full advantage of the features of ZFS.

End-to-End Data Integrity
Under Solaris ZFS, all your data is protected by 256-bit checksums, resulting in 99.99999999999999999% error detection and correction. Solaris ZFS constantly reads and checks data to help ensure it is correct, and if it detects an error in a storage pool with redundancy (protected with mirroring, Solaris ZFS RAIDZ, or Solaris ZFS RAIDZ2), Solaris ZFS automatically repairs the corrupt data. This contributes to relentless availability by helping to protect against costly and time-consuming data loss due to hardware or software failure and by reducing the chance of administrator error when performing file system-related tasks.

Immense Capacity
Solaris ZFS is a 128-bit file system, and it provides 16 billion, billion times the capacity of 32-bit or even 64-bit file systems. Hence, it supports more file systems, snapshots, and files in a file system than can possibly be created in the foreseeable future.

• Read the Article: Sun's ZFS is close to perfect, but widely misunderstood (InfoWorld)
• Read the Article: See Why the ZFS File System is such a Big Leap Forward
• ZFS FAQs
• ZFS in Solaris Containers
• Feature Article: ZFS—The Last Word In File Systems
• Comparing ZFS vs. Linux Raid and LVM
• ZFS Ready For Home Use
• Moving ZFS Pools
• Comparison of file systems

Related

• Sun StorageTek QFS
• Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager (SAM)
• OpenSolaris Storage Community
• Open Storage Solutions