ZFS may be the best-known enterprise-grade transactional file system to use storage pools to manage physical storage space. It is not the only one on the market, however. ZFS competes with ext4 for market share in the data management system world.  While both ZFS and ext4 can retain massive amounts of data in a secure, non-cloud storage pool system, the two…

Introducing ZFS: Your Enterprise-Grade File System  Many people have heard of ZFS, but are unsure what it actually is. So, what is ZFS? The Zeta File System (ZOL on Linux) is an enterprise-grade transactional file system that uses the concept of storage pools to manage physical storage space. Sun Microsystems began work on the product in 2001 and released it in…

Introduction If you are a storage expert, you may have heard about these two protocols. But buying new storage arrays may face barriers of selectivity, such as Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI, and determining which is better. Based on their reliability, performance, cost, scalability, and flexibility, we compare the two to help you make an informed decision. Fibre Channel Overview…

Introduction QoS (Quality of Service) is a term used in the field of packet-switched networks to refer to the probability that a network will satisfy a given business contract. In many cases, informally refers to the probability that a packet will pass between two points in the network. QoS has a control mechanism that provides different priorities for different…

IT Faces the Problems of Retired Drives When disk drives are retired and moved outside from the data center into someone else’s hands, the data on those drives is put at significant risk. IT administrators routinely retire drives for a variety of reasons, including: Returning drives for warranty, repair, maintenance, or expired lease agreements Removal and disposal of disk…