What Is ZFS?: A Brief Primer

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[MartinPowderly]

I'm an engineer with almost 30 years experience in the storage industry at a low level (the bottom 3 or four turtles in the stack you alluded to) with other Sun Microsystems engineers who worked on most things you're talking about, including the full fat ZFS. I properly enjoyed your video and really like the fact that you mentioned that computers barely work. Storage reliability is one of the most complex computing problems out there in a world obsessed with the higher parts of the IT stack assuming everything Just Works (tm). Latency, throughput and reliability quite often can be mutually exclusive practices.

When you test for any issues and see some race conditions in the lab every 6 months... you can bet your customer base (depending on its size) will see that kind of issue in 6 days. Storage is Hard, like... properly hard. :)

Thanks for your video. It brought me back to why I do this.

[DrathVader]

I love how a 30+ minute video is a brief primer on this channel.
No, I'm not being sarcastic, I actually love that.

[KushalPandya]

Oracle acquiring Sun is classic example of some evil corp buying a really good company and destroy it.

[Gilgwathir]

Wendell:"Brief primer"
Me: "Really? Brief?"
Wendell: "30 minutes"
Me: "Oh, ok! That's very brief for ZFS!"

[TheDemocrab]

Excellent, this comes up literally the same day I buy three 6TB drives for my first ZFS setup. :D

[thomasesr]

I love ZFS, it is the best FS I've used, at work and at home.
I really like the snapshot functionality

[KenS]

I use ZFS everyday, we use it on most of our storage devices, and I'm still learning new stuff about it on a regular basis. Sun really did some great work.

[erisdiscordia]

I'd love a video on ZFS tuning. So far, all articles etc. on this topic have been a complete mystery to me, the documentation is just not very helpful to me in this regard. It only talks about hundreds of tunables without any comprehensive explanation (that a person without a deep understanding of the source code could understand) what they mean.

[WebMedics]

I’m so glad people like you are working so hard to educate us; I owe you. If you are ever in London, my house is your house.

[yanniskouretas]

2:50 oh the days we've had SUN-BLADE workstations with Solaris OS, SPARC processors and the rest .... such nice systems to work on ... some still survive till today (almost 20 years later)... only a few of us original IT guys know how to use and administer them so their days are numbered (in small number).

[NWinnVR]

Thank you for this. Having someone like you explain it is so much more digestible than reading a ton of technical documents..
Would love to see a video like this for *XFS* ! But if you don't want to that's totally understandable.

[Alphahydro]

Good stuff Wendell. For months I poured over reviews of raid cards to run a raid 5 array. Then I was introduced to FreeNAS and ZFS, and when I found out all was needed was a decent hba, I was sold. ZFS is crucial for data protection.

[emileturcotte]

I enjoy these types of videos way more than tech news on the other channel, I would really like if the focus would shift towards teaching material such as this!

[NickNorton]

As a viewer from the overseas. I appreciate your Aloominum vs. Al-u-min-i-um - I mean Zed vs. Zee distinction.

[sandro-here]

This is probably the best ZFS explanation I've ever encountered in my life.

[AndreasRavnestad]

I started using ZFS a few days ago, and I was really blown away at how incredibly simple it was. I wanted to configure four identical disks in RAID 10, and this was the only command I had to use:
$ sudo zpool create NAME mirror VDEV1 VDEV2 mirror VDEV3 VDEV4
And that was it. No need for formatting or lenghty initialization processes. It just worked right away, and performance is excellent. I'm sure ZFS can get really complicated for more intricate setups with caching and tiering and tuning, but for my simple use case it was refreshing to see how easy it was.

[bertnijhof]

I live in a country with 2 to 14 power-fails/week and I had a lot of garbled music files, so I'm very happy with ZFS and its Copy On Write. I even have my dataset with music stored with copies=2, basically introducing a mirror for that dataset in an otherwise striped datapool.

[wildmanjeff]

2 years later--ZFS is still rock solid and I have to say the only time I have lost data, is when I tried to use the command line to move data instead of TrueNas native data transfer. Probably error on my part. I understand more now about ZFS, and love freeBSD which natively supports it and so I have not done anything with BTRFS.
Great Informative video !

[brianmccullough]

I put butter on everything, just not my file system. BTRfs is catchy, like you can't say "I can't belive its not ZFS" it doesn't roll off the tounge

[bdhaliwal]

Thanks for this great fireside chat Wendel, you are the best