zfs discuss - Apr 2009 - ZFS Tutorial at USENIX Technical Conference (USENIX09)

I will be conducting a tutorial on ZFS at the USENIX Technical 
Conference in San Diego
on June 14, 2009. I hope you can attend! Here is the blurb in the 
conference agenda.

There is still time for me to add content, so send me your wish list and 
I''ll try
to accommodate.

Additional information will be posted to my blog and consulting site.
http://richardelling.blogspot.com
http://www.richardelling.com


S2 ZFS: A File System for Modern Hardware NEW! ?

Who should attend: Systems engineers, integrators, and administrators 
who are interested
in deploying ZFS on Solaris, Mac OS X, or FreeBSD. Participants should 
be familiar
with storage devices, RAID systems, logical volume managers, backup, and 
file system
features. Special emphasis will be placed on integration considerations 
for virtualization,
NAS, and databases.

File systems developed in the mid 20th century were severely constrained 
by the
storage hardware available at the time. ZFS was conceived with an eye 
toward the
hardware of the future and how storage would evolve. This perspective on 
the
future presented an opportunity to rethink how file systems use storage 
hardware.
The result of this endeavor is a new way of managing data which can 
evolve as
the hardware changes, while remaining compatible with earlier notions of 
file system
use. Along the way, new concepts such as the Hybrid Storage Pool provide 
new
opportunities for optimization, efficiency, and data protection. In this 
tutorial, ZFS
will be examined from the bottom up, to build a solid understanding of 
the data-hardware
interface, and then from the top down, to provide insight into the best 
ways to use ZFS
for applications.

Take back to work: A solid understanding of the concepts behind ZFS and 
how to
make the best decisions when implementing storage at your site.

Topics include:

Evolution of hardware and file systems
Storage pools
RAID data protection
Import/export and shared storage
Pool parameters and features
On-disk format
Data sets
Volumes
POSIX-compliant file systems
Snapshots
Replication
Practical considerations and best practices
Deployment and migration
Virtualization
Sharing
Performance, observability, and tuning
Data protection
Hybrid storage pools
Backup, restore, and archiving

I hope to see you in San Diego!
-- richard