Ubiquitous Talk

SUN Delivers De-duplication on ZFS

Today marks yet another great milestone for OpenSolaris and OpenStorage. SUN has as promised, delivered a much anticipated de-duplication feature for us to explore and use.  I must say that I am very excited about it and with no doubt this is a very cool feature indeed The ideas for how to use it are running around in my head like neurons do and your sure to see some of those ideas surface in a blog or two.

Now before we get too excited we need to keep in mind that this is the first release of this feature to the public space and we are sure to find the odd bump or two along the road while seeing this new very great file system feature mature. I’m sure that we will be more than pleased with the new feature and the many other capabilities that are sure to come.

If your interested in experimenting with the development releases you should be able to get your hands on the feature in about 3-4 weeks through IPS or SXCE. Or if your an advanced kernel type IT pro you could build it using the source code now….right…so then, for the rest of us.

To try it out the easy way when it becomes available just download and install OpenSolaris with the LiveCD (I recommend an x64 CPU with 4G of ram)

http://dlc.sun.com/osol/opensolaris/2009/06/osol-0906-x86.iso

Then set your repository publisher to the dev IPS image server and issue the pkg image-update command

e.g.

$ pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev opensolaris.org

$ pfexec pkg image-update

And explore!

Jeff Bonwick, Bill Moore and company are definitely thinking up some brilliant technical and practical applications of their knowledge bringing us a powerful new storage direction that has changed the game.

Thanks go to the ZFS team.

You rock!

Regards,

Mike

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