Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 and ZFS

Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 and ZFS

Abstract:
There was much discussion over the years over the discontinuance of Solaris Express distribution, the creation of OpenSolaris distribution, the discontinuance of OpenSolaris distribution, and ultimately the re-announcement of Solaris Express distribution. More information regarding Solaris Express has been leaked.

Designated Release:
It appears that there will be a release of Solaris Express referred next month or so, designated as Solaris 11 Express 2010.11!

RAID-Z/Mirror Hybrid Allocator:
Mirrored layout across the children of a RAID-Z vdev to ensure latency sensitive metadata can be read in a single I/O. See bug 6977913 reference.

ZFS "zdb" Enhancements:
Support for decompression, checksumming, and RAID-Z in "zdb" has been requested since 2008-Q4. See bug 6757444 reference.

ZFS File System Listing Enhancement:
Performance has been improved for listing ZFS file systems.

ZFS Encryption:
During 2003, a request was made to include encryption in ZFS, a welcome addition for laptops. The bug-id for this feature is 4854202.

Future Solaris 11 Support:
Solaris 11 is expected to power the new generation of embedded systems from Oracle including Exadata X2-8 database machine and Exalogic cloud-in-a-box!

Summary:
There is more than this in the next release to come, but this gives us a clear direction of where we are at and where we are going!