We spoke about ZFS in a Chapter 3, Architecting a Storage Cluster. ZFS is a filesystem that was developed by Sun Microsystems and was later acquired by Oracle. The project was later made open source and was ported to Linux. Although the project is still in beta, most of the features work fine and the majority of the problems have been ruled out—the project is now focused on adding new features.
ZFS is a software layer that combines disk management, logical volumes, and a filesystem all in one. Advanced features such as compression, adaptive replacement cache (ARC), deduplication, and snapshots make it ideal to work with GlusterFS as the backend for the bricks.