ZFS putback! Party on!

Jeff Bonwick posted on Hallowe’en that they’ve commited the ZFS bits into the mainline Solaris tree. Seems that Oct. 31st has a bit of a history with ZFS, which is kinda cool. The fact that ZFS didn’t come with the initial Solaris 10 release was a huge disapointment for me, but man, here we are, with ZFS due to arrive in the next Solaris Express!

I can’t wait to try it, since I have a bunch of systems that look like this:

Filesystem             Size   Used  Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d0          17G   4.2G        13G    25%    /
/dev/md/dsk/d7          48G   3.9G        44G     9%    /var
swap                    79G    40K        79G     1%    /var/run
swap                    79G   176K        79G     1%    /tmp
/dev/dsk/c3t40d2s6     1.6T   355G       1.2T    23%    /projects/03
/dev/md/dsk/d40        3.2T   2.5T       680G    79%    /projects/02
/dev/dsk/c3t40d3s6     1.6T   1.4T       202G    88%    /projects/04
/dev/dsk/c3t40d4s6     1.6T   1.3T       297G    82%    /projects/05
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I’ve been waiting years for something like ZFS from Sun. I’ve been bitching about crufty UFS for about as long (compare Solaris’ UFS to your options on Linux — Reiser and XFS — and you’ll understand my pain), and refusing to pay the VxFS tax for the same number of years. The closest thing I’ve found to salvation is NetApp’s WAFL. It’s no surprise that the bulk of our data is held on NetApp filers, then. But there’s still lots of times when I just want to plug dozen’s of TeraBytes into the back of a box. 2TB at a time.

Next challenge? Backing up that petabyte filesystem. Ain’t gonna be pretty with Veritas NetBackup only supporting up to 2TB in a stream…

To the ZFS team: Thank you. I’ll be one of the first to beat on ZFS once the next Solaris Express hits the wire. I can’t wait!