Data Integrity
So what makes the VFusion system so reliable? Here are some key differences to traditional filesystems
- Data and Metadata Check-summing
- Self-Healing: Detecting and correcting Silent-Data-Errors with Scrub utility
- Atomic Transaction Writes: Data always being consistent, no need for repairing the file system.
Small data corruption
Small data corruption may happen at any time and in fact it does happen often, even on enterprise-class drives.
Standard disks
Standard disks redundancy (RAID or mirror) does not protect against silent corruption.
Filesystem
Filesystem receives damaged data that is further passed to an application which operates on corrupted data.
output is worthless
Because application gets incorrect input its output is worthless as well.
Silent data corruption prevention in ZFS
ZFS mirror
Application issues a read. ZFS mirror tries first disk. Checksum reveals that the block is corrupted on the disk.
ZFS tries
ZFS tries second disk. Checksum indicates that the block is good.
FS returns
