This is a screen shot of my OpenSolaris install. I created an approx. 2,000 GB storage pool out of 3x 1TB hard disk drives. You’d think it should add up to 3,000 GB of storage … but one of the disks is being used to provide redundancy to the pool. My data is being spread out over 3x disks, so now, if one of the disks fails, I can easily replace it with any disk of similar capacity and OpenSolaris will automatically recover my data for me.
The real cool part? After copying all my data across to the new storage pool, I took a backup of the data using a single command, zfs snapshot -r tank/share@20090205
This is all made possible by the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) feature in OpenSolaris, an open source project from Sun Microsystems.
Somewhere there’s a sysadmin slaving over some tape backups or wrestling with logical volume management, manually copying old data over to new disks. ZFS takes manageability of disk resources to a whole new level of simplicity. Adding more space to the pool is simply a matter of unboxing the new drives, connecting them and adding them to the pool. The pool automatically grows larger to accommodate the new disks and data is magically spread over the new enalrged pool.
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