Introduction

ZFS is a 128-bit transactional filesystem offered by Oracle Solaris 11, and it supports 256 trillion directory entries, does not have any upper limit of files, and is always consistent on disk. Oracle Solaris 11 makes ZFS its default filesystem, which provides some features such as storage pool, snapshots, clones, and volumes. When administering ZFS objects, the first step is to create a ZFS storage pool. It can be made from full disks, files, and slices, considering that the minimum size of any mentioned block device is 128 MB. Furthermore, when creating a ZFS pool, the possible RAID configurations are stripe (Raid 0), mirror (Raid 1), and RAID-Z (a kind of RAID-5). Both the mirror and RAID-Z configurations support a feature named self-healing data that works by protecting data. In this case, when a bad block arises in a disk, the ZFS framework fetches the same block from another replicated disk to repair the original bad block. RAID-Z presents three variants: raidz1 (similar...