Meetings and Events

zfs(8), More Proof UNIX is Dead, Isaac (.ike) Levy

2013-07-03 @ 18:45 EDT (22:45 UTC) - Suspenders Bar and Restaurant +

"This (ZFS) is definately one of the most exciting things for me to see happening."
- 2007, Kirk McKusick, original author of the UFS/FFS Filesystem

Six years of use is enough time for this presenter to trust a new filesystem.

The aim of this talk is to provide enough information to dive right into using ZFS, professionally and personally. This presentation assumes basic UNIX knowledge, and a mind ready to be blown.

The Zettabyte File System (ZFS) is a combined filesystem and logical volume manager. Originally designed by Sun Microsystems, pjd@ ported ZFS to FreeBSD over 6 years ago. The features of ZFS include protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-writeclones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs.

And that's not even the fun stuff...

Have you ever wanted to just add a disk to grow a RAID volume?
Have you ever wanted to choose to boot from a particular snapshot of a volume?
Have you ever wanted to change filesystem settings on a live mounted volume, like atime or readonly?
Have you ever waited while your life slips away while formatting multi-TB disks?
Have you ever needed to dynamically change the hard limits of a logical disk partition?
Have you ever dreamed of block-level disk compression, to actually put all those fast CPU cores to some use?
Have you ever wanted filesystems to perform atomic acrobatics like great database systems can?

This presentation aims to provide a solid overview of:

ZFS core features
ZFS practical usage, from laptops to mammoth file storage
Some modern SATA "gotchas" will be covered
ZFS advanced/special uses, and paths to follow outside this talk
The general state of ZFS on FreeBSD, (and other projects)

.ike has been using ZFS, for big and small, since it first hit FreeBSD. Today in ike's professional life, his team is responsible for many racks of servers booting on ZFS volumes (Solaris).

Ike has spent more than 15 years obsessed with high-availability systems on the internet. Lucky to stand on the shoulders of UNIX giants, his background includes partnering to run an early Virtual Server ISP (before there was a cloud), as well as having a long history standing up internet-facing applications on UNIX systems and networks.

.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January 2004. He was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User Group, and is still in denial that this group no longer exists. He has spoken frequently on a number of UNIX and internet security topics at various venues, particularly on the issue of FreeBSD's jail(8), (a presentation now banned on several continents). .ike also likes POSIX shell programming, ssh, and digitizes rare books for fun.

Event Audio (recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)