Filesystems

Actually, ZFS is available on Linux too as a user space filesystem, and Sun are considering a kernel port: http://www.wizy.org/wiki/ZFS_on_FUSE

However, I'm inclined to wait for btrfs (butter-fs). Here's a review of btrfs from an ex-ZFS engineer: http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/

Oracle are working on a new generation NFS replacement designed specifically to benefit from some of the btrfs features: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/crfs/

Here's an article one of the truely astonishing btrfs features: You can upgrade an existing linux file system to btrfs without destroying the existing fs or duplicating the data! http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Conversion_from_Ext3 well, what are the alternatives?

- ext3 does not support more than 16GB, - ext4 does but is too young and lacks the features of zfs and btrfs - xfs also does but lacks the features of zfs and btrfs, and requires at least a good UPS. Bad XFS crashes are not unheard of. - don't know about jfs

All four do not support compression.

It should be clear that a 100 TB filesystem requires some kind of backup. And tape backup itself is tricky and costly to get right.

Currently, I would setup a Solaris fileserver with ZFS because ZFS is mature and the filesystem can be read by FreeBSD and Linux. A few months ago I tried an OpenSolaris installation CD and it worked like a charm.

One possibility in Linux is ZFS over FUSE; this has a large number of advantages over other filesystems (except Btrfs) - see http://www.linux-magazine.com/w3/issue/103/ZFS.pdf . The article explains installation for Ubuntu. I must admit that I did not try it so far.

The alternative would be Btrfs, see http://www.h-online.com/open/The-Btrfs-file-system--/features/113738 . This is available for latest Fedora and Ubuntu, is part of the recently released 2.6.31 kernel (http://www.h-online.com/open/Kernel-Log-2-6-31-Tracking--/features/113671), and will therefore in the future be available in all distros.