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ZFS Deduplication

You knew this day was coming: ZFS now has built-in deduplication. If you already know what dedup is and why you want it, you can skipthe next couple of...

You knew this day was coming: ZFS now has built-in deduplication. If you already know what dedup is and why you want it, you can skipthe next couple of sections. For everyone else, let's start witha little background. What is it? Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data.Dedup is generally either file-level, block-level, or byte-level.Chunks of data -- files, blocks, or byte ranges -- are checksummedusing some hash function that uniquely identifies...

How to Lose a Customer

For over a year I have been the proud and happy owner of a Garmin GPS unit -- the Nuvi 360.  I have practically been a walking billboard for the company.  Go...

For over a year I have been the proud and happy owner of a Garmin GPS unit -- the Nuvi 360.  I have practically been a walking billboard for the company.  Go ahead, ask me about my Nuvi!That changed today, permanently.  When I powered on the Nuvi this morning, it alerted me that its map database was over a year old and should be updated.  That makes sense, I thought -- indeed, how nice of them to remind me!  So I brought the Nuvi inside, plugged it into my Mac, and went to...

A Near-Death Experience

Evidently, my previous post was just a tad too cheerful for some folks' taste.  But I speak with the optimism of a man who has cheated death.  And ironically,...

Evidently, my previous post was just a tad too cheerful for some folks' taste.  But I speak with the optimism of a man who has cheated death.  And ironically, Pete's reference to George Cameron had a lot to do with it.Several years ago, George and a few other Sun folks went off to form 3par, a new storage company.  They all had Solaris expertise, and understood its advantages, so they wanted to use it inside their box.  But we weren't open-source at the time, and our...

Solaris Inside

When you choose an OS for your laptop, many things affect your decision: application support, availability of drivers, ease of use, and so on.But if you were...

When you choose an OS for your laptop, many things affect your decision: application support, availability of drivers, ease of use, and so on.But if you were developing a storage appliance, what would you want from the operating system that runs inside it?The first thing you notice is all the things you don't care about: graphics cards, educational software, photoshop... none of it matters. What's left, then?  What do you really need from a storage OS? And why isn't Linux the...

The General-Purpose Storage Revolution

It happened so slowly, most people didn't notice until it was over.I'm speaking, of course, of the rise of general-purpose computing during the 1990s.  It was...

It happened so slowly, most people didn't notice until it was over.I'm speaking, of course, of the rise of general-purpose computing during the 1990s.  It was not so long ago that you could choose from a truly bewildering variety of machines.  Symbolics, for example, made hardware specifically designed to run Lisp programs.  We debated SIMD vs. MIMD, dataflow vs. control flow, VLIW, and so on.  Meanwhile, those boring little PCs just kept getting faster.  And more capable. ...

Out of the mouths of babes...

After sizing up the computers we have at home, my son Andrew made the following declaration: "I want Solaris security, Mac interface, and Windows...

After sizing up the computers we have at home, my son Andrew made the following declaration: "I want Solaris security, Mac interface, and Windows compatibility."  Age 10.  Naturally, sensing a teachable moment, I explained to him what virtualization is all about -- bootcamp, Parallels, Xen, etc.  And the thing is, he really gets it.  I can't wait to see what his generation is capable of.

Welcome

Welcome aboard! I'm Jeff Bonwick, a Distinguished Engineer (la-de-da!) at Sun. I'm guessing you're here because you recently read about ZFS.Let me begin with a...

Welcome aboard! I'm Jeff Bonwick, a Distinguished Engineer (la-de-da!) at Sun. I'm guessing you're here because you recently read about ZFS.Let me begin with a note of thanks.According to Sun's website staff, the ZFS article has generated the highest reader response ever -- thank you! The ZFS team gets to see all the feedback you provide, so please keep it coming. I'll respond to some of the more interesting comments in this blog.My favorite comment thus far was a caustic...