Sun Microsystems has previewed a new file system technology in the Solaris 10 Operating System. Dubbed Dynamic File System, it automates many of the common tasks of system administrators.
Solaris is the world's most popular enterprise Unix operating system and runs virtually all of the major enterprise applications available today.
According to Tertius Bezuidenhout, national sales engineer manager at Sun Microsystems SA, Dynamic File System (DFS) is the only self-healing, self-managing OS file system technology. It provides 16 billion times more capacity than current file systems for virtually unlimited scalability. "DFS constantly reads and checks data to ensure it is correct, and if it detects an error in a mirrored data pool, the technology can automatically repair the corrupt data," he says.
Unlike existing file systems that require a separate volume manager, DFS is built on top of shared virtual storage pools, making the creation and deletion of file systems far less complex. "This reduces overall costs by simplifying administration and allowing resources to be shared among file systems, which also helps to increase storage utilisation," says Bezuidenhout.
He explains that DFS automates tasks such as creating and growing file systems - the technology reduces this activity from 28 separate tasks down to just five. In another example of the increased efficiency of the system, DFS reduces the time it takes to add mirrored file systems for three users from 40 minutes to 10 seconds.
The highly reliable, always-on Dynamic File System is one of more than 600 new features in the Solaris 10 OS.
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