What is ZFS ?

ZFS (Zettabyte File System) is one of the file systems provided by Sun Microsystems. It is very modern designed and powerful file system and you can manage the devices easily.

Basically, ZFS is for Solaris and Open Solaris OS. Unfortunately, at present time, it is not ported Linux kernel. ZFS license is not suitable for Linux license.

If you want to know "what is ZFS", I suppose you to read the Sun Microsystems HP. Sun Microsystems publishes the Solaris OS manuals on its web site. It is very good text to learn ZFS architecture. ZFS administration Guide (english site) is here. You can change language, if you want to.

Roughly, ZFS is software RAID manager. So, you can get RAID devices in your computers.

For example, you have tree HDDs, 20GB, 40GB and 80GB, and you need 100GB disk space, you can create it from those three HDDs with one command!!! It called "pool". the physical disk devices managed in pool. The pool mounts into directory.
Of course, ZFS supports the redundancy. You can get equivalently RAID-5, therewith RAID-6! It called RAID-Z.

That's all ?, not yet.

You combine two pools into one another pool, then, you get equivalently RAID-1.

Oops!, then you need to install Solaris OS in you computer!

But, there is FUSE (Filesystem in User space) project. Many people try to port many file systems for various OS that is not support its file system originally.

Using FUSE, we can get ZFS on Linux.