ZFS is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of Sun Microsystems’ Solaris OS in 2001. In 2013, OpenZFS was founded to coordinate the development of open source ZFS.
The management of stored data generally involves two aspects:
- the physical volume management of one or more block storage devices, including their organization into logical block devices as VDEVs (ZFS Virtual Device) as seen by the operating system
- and the management of data and files that are stored on these logical block devices (a file system or other data storage).
ZFS is unusual in that it unifies both of these roles and acts as both the volume manager and the file system.
ZFS is designed to ensure that data stored on disks cannot be lost due to physical errors, mis-processing by the hardware or operating system, or bit rot events and data corruption that may happen over time. Its complete control of the storage system is used to ensure that every step, whether related to file management or disk management, is verified, confirmed, corrected if needed, and optimized, in a way that the storage controller cards and separate volume and file systems cannot achieve.
ZFS also includes a mechanism for ZFS Dataset & Zvol and pool-level snapshots and replication, including snapshot cloning, which is described by the FreeBSD documentation as one of its “most powerful features”. Very large numbers of snapshots can be taken without degrading performance. Snapshots can be rolled back “live” or previous file system states can be viewed. They can also be cloned to form new independent file systems.
Source: Wikipedia (edited)