

Therefore, it has complete knowledge of both the physical disks and volumes (including their condition, status, their logical arrangement into volumes, and also of all the files stored on them). ZFS is unusual, because unlike most other storage systems, it unifies both of these roles and acts as both the volume manager and the file system. The management of the individual devices and their presentation as a single device, is distinct from the management of the files held on that apparent device. The user sees this as a single volume, containing an NTFS-formatted drive of their data, and NTFS is not necessarily aware of the manipulations that may be required (such as rebuilding the RAID array if a disk fails). Historically, the management of stored data has involved two aspects - the physical management of block devices such as hard drives and SD cards, and devices such as RAID controllers that present a logical single device based upon multiple physical devices (often undertaken by a volume manager, array manager, or suitable device driver), and the management of files stored as logical units on these logical block devices (a file system).Example: A RAID array of 2 hard drives and an SSD caching disk is controlled by Intel's RST system, part of the chipset and firmware built into a desktop computer. In response, OpenZFS was created as a new open-source development umbrella project, aiming at bringing together individuals and companies that use the ZFS filesystem in an open-source manner.
MACZFS VS ZEVO CODE
In 2010, Oracle stopped the releasing of source code for new OpenSolaris and ZFS development, effectively forking their closed-source development from the open-source branch. ZFS became a standard feature of Solaris 10 in June 2006.
MACZFS VS ZEVO SOFTWARE
In 2005, the bulk of Solaris, including ZFS, was licensed as open-source software under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), as the OpenSolaris project. Originally, ZFS was proprietary, closed-source software developed internally by Sun as part of Solaris, with a team led by the CTO of Sun's storage business unit and Sun Fellow, Jeff Bonwick. The ZFS name originally stood for "Zettabyte File System". The ZFS name is registered as a trademark of Oracle Corporation.



ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems.
