ZFS

ZFS is a Linux-based, user-space filesystem that provides a simple, flexible, and powerful way to manage and manage ZFS pools. On Netsoc infra, we use ZFS to more easily set up disks. ZFS also uses an Arc Cache to speed up the process of reading and writing data to and from the disk. While this uses a lot of memory (on Scalper, it is ~8GB), it provides read speed benefits.

ZFS Pool

A ZFS pool is a collection of ZFS virtual devices (vdevs) that appear as a single storage device accessible to the filesystem.

ZFS Mirror

A ZFS mirror is a setup where 2 or more disks are used to store the same data. It allows for good IO performance (due to being able to read from two disks at the same time) and is also a good way to protect your data from failure (as to lose any data, all disks need to fail).