ZFS, OpenSolaris, Nexenta -- eating my words

[Michael Torrie]

Someone recently posted about OpenSolaris and Gnu/Solaris and asked if
any of use would ever be interested in trying it out.  At the time I
said no since it didn't offer me anything I didn't already have.

Well, that has suddenly changed with the announcement of Sun's uber-fs,
ZFS [1].  I only have just a small inkling of what ZFS is all about, and
I get the feeling this is really big.  Actually huge.  This is a major
advancement in free unix distros.  In my mind this is as huge as xen is
going to be.  When this is stable, I can't see any reason to use any
other LVM/RAID/FS over ZFS.  It just simply knocks the socks off of
anything Linux has to offer right now.  I hope Linux can adopt this
technology somehow.

Anyway, I rarely get excited about developments in Unix or even Linux.
But this one I feel is very major.  The ironic thing is Slashdot had a
story about ZFS, but it was only a minor story with only 11 comments.
Slashdotters completely missed this one.  

I just might be installing OpenSolaris or Nexenta[2] and building these
beta kernels with ZFS support to see how it works.

Michael

[1] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/
[2] http://www.gnusolaris.org

-- 
Michael Torrie <torriem at chem.byu.edu>