Sun unveils 'breakthrough' Solaris file system

Sun Microsystems has offered a sneak peek at the "breakthrough" file system due to ship in its Solaris 10 operating system.

The company claimed that Solaris Dynamic File System (DFS) will provide a major advance in the file system/volume manager model of computer data management by automating many common tasks performed by system administrators.

An estimated 80,000 users are currently previewing Solaris 10, according to Sun.

The vendor said that, unlike existing file systems that require a separate volume manager, the Solaris DFS is built on top of shared virtual storage pools, making the creation and deletion of file systems far less complex.

This is designed to reduce overall costs and allow resources to be shared among file systems, which also helps to increase storage utilisation.

DFS automates many common tasks. Creating and growing file systems has been reduced from 28 separate tasks to five, the company claimed.

The DFS data management model can constantly read and check data to help ensure that it is correct, and can automatically repair corrupt data if it detects an error in a mirrored pool.

"Customers are embracing the raft of innovations we are bringing to the Solaris OS on industry-standard AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon and Sparc-based systems," said John Loiacono, Sun's executive vice president of software, in a statement.