ZFS

ZFS (previously Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, including ZFS, were published under an open source license as OpenSolaris for around 5 years from 2005…

Key facts

First appeared
2005
Category
technology
Problem solved
ZFS was created to address the pervasive problems of data corruption, storage management complexity, and limited scalability inherent in traditional filesystems and volume managers. It aimed to provide a unified, highly reliable, and easily manageable storage solution that could dynamically scale to handle vast amounts of data while protecting against silent data corruption through end-to-end checksums and transactional writes.
Platforms
macos, ios, Illumos (e.g., OpenIndiana, SmartOS), linux, macOS (via OpenZFS on Mac), unix, web, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows (via OpenZFS on Windows), Solaris, NetBSD, windows

Related technologies

Notable users

  • SmartOS
  • Netflix (historically for storage infrastructure)
  • Many small to large-scale data storage and server environments
  • Ubuntu Server (as an installation option)
  • TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS)
  • Proxmox VE