STORAGE, EXPLAINED

Data integrity

Checksums, copy-on-write and self-healing help protect the integrity of data as it moves through your storage system.

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 may happen at any time and in fact it does happen often, even on enterprise-class drives.

Standard disks redundancy (RAID or mirror) does not protect against silent corruption.

Filesystem receives damaged data that is further passed to an application which operates on corrupted data.

Because application gets incorrect input its output is worthless as well.

Application issues a read. ZFS mirror tries first disk. Checksum reveals that the block is corrupted on the disk.

ZFS tries second disk. Checksum indicates that the block is good.

ZFS returns good data to the application and repairs the damaged block.