ZFS and raidz3

Solaris originally started with their raidz technology for their zfs file system. Eventually came raidz2. And finally raidz3 with the release of Solaris 11, stripping with parity. A total of three disks of duplicate data. This is a great for highly resilient or larger systems with a considerable number of disks. Since you can sustain a number of disk loss and still continue to keep your zfs pool online, it takes a lot of pressure off getting replacement disks asap. One thing important to note is that it is always a good idea to arrange for a global hotspare that can serve any raidz array. Below is an example of how to use raidz3 in zfs:

root@computer:~# zpool create data raidz3 /disk/disk1 /disk/disk2 /disk/disk3 /disk/disk4 /disk/disk5 spare /disk/disk6
root@computer:~# zpool status data
  pool: data
 state: ONLINE
 scan: none requested
config:

        NAME             STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        data             ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz3-0       ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disk/disk1  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disk/disk2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disk/disk3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disk/disk4  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disk/disk5  ONLINE       0     0     0
        spares
          /disk/disk6    AVAIL

errors: No known data errors

As you can see the array name is raidz3. And the pool has one spare. This is a good practice since it is typical to have many raidz pools. Solaris continues to dominate the storage market through innovations such as these.