Fishworks gets de-duplication

Sun's 7000 series storage products (known as Fishworks) are about to be updated with improved replication (much needed in our case) and de-duplication.

OpenSolaris 2010.03 + rsync == backup perfection?

The release of OpenSolaris 2010.03 is going to add ZFS de-duplication to the already extensive list of ZFS features. De-duplication and the ZFS implementation are expertly explained on Jeff Bonwick's Blog. ZFS already sports a great double parity RAID implementation (known as RAID-Z2), excellent snapshot support, end-to-end checksumming, transparent compression and variable block sizes. The combination of theses features already make Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris great for backup servers, but the addition of de-duplication is going to make Sun's offerings unbeatable for this task.

With de-duplication, variable block sizes and compression saving your disk space, snapshots giving your backups history and the checksums giving you confidence in your backups' integrity, the only task left, is to get some data onto your backup server. Anyone who has ever used `rsync`, will tell you that it's the best tool for this job and, whilst I wholeheartedly agree, I am also interested to try out ZFS' replication. This allows you to transfer a snapshot (think incremental backup) or a whole file system (full backup) to a remote system using nothing more than `zfs`, a few pipes and `ssh`.