When ZFS first appeared in 2005, it was absolutely with the times, but it’s remained stuck there ever since. The ZFS engineers did a lot right when they combined the best features of a volume manager with a “zettabyte-scale” filesystem in Solaris 10:
- ZFS achieves the kind of scalability every modern filesystem should have, with few limits in terms of data or metadata count and volume or file size.
- ZFS includes checksumming of all data and metadata to detect corruption, an absolutely essential feature for long-term large-scale storage.
- When ZFS detects an error, it can automatically reconstruct data from mirrors, parity, or alternate locations.
- Mirroring and multiple-parity “RAID Z” are built in, combining multiple physical media devices seamlessly into a logical volume.
- ZFS includes robust snapshot and mirror capabilities, including the ability to update the data on other volumes incrementally.
- Data can be compressed on the fly and deduplication is supported as well.
