OpenSolaris 2009.06

The digital world has forced us to create digital solutions to digital problems. For instance, my other hobby, photography, now creates hundreds if not thousands of digital files, which are easily lost. To prevent this, I used to burn them to discs, either CDs or DVDs. But recently it has come out that the data on these burn discs can be corrupted in a shorter period of time than originally thought, some 10 years or so. Because of this, I began thinking about a file server. One with redundancy and lots of storage. I didn't want to worry about this stuff anymore. Enter Opensolaris.

OpenSolaris is the open source version of Solaris, an operating system made by Sun Microsystems for a long time. Sun used to be a hardware company disguised as a software company. There database software, MySQL, is a well known open source solution, as is OpenOffice, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Now, however, as many fringe architectures are falling apart thanks to the economy, they've branched out to the open source community. The OpenSolaris discs are available as Live Boot discs, from OpenSolaris.org, and are very friendly especially to those who have used any version of Linux, BSD, or Unix in the past.

My interest in OpenSolaris was peaked when reading an article on what type of raid to use in my upcoming file server, I learned about ZFS. ZFS is a file system developed by Sun Microsystems to be the end all of end alls. ZFS originally stood for Zettabyte File System. In case you were wondering, a zettabyte is 2^70 bytes. That is one billion (1,000,000,000) terabytes. The file system was designed to be usable from now until we as humans realize we have too much data. But I don't have this much data. What attracted me to ZFS is that it was designed for snapshots of data, continuous integrity checking, and automatic repair.

OpenSolaris makes it easy to get into ZFS, with the Solaris name to back it up. We'll see what I can get it to do for me.

For more information, visit http://www.opensolaris.org, or for more information on ZFS visit http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/