вЂњWe are excited to help sponsor this work. Thus, its cost and complexity has prevented any single organization from pursuing its development,вЂќ adds Kirk McKusick, long-time filesystem developer and FreeBSD Foundation Board Director.ДЄllan Jude, a core team member at FreeBSD states, вЂњThis collaboration between the non-profit FreeBSD Foundation and industry partner Delphix towards the development of new cross-platform features, will benefit all OpenZFS vendors and consumers вЂ“ showcasing the power of platform neutral open-source projects.вЂќ Adding this feature requires a deep knowledge of ZFS internals and significant development and testing time. This project will allow RAID-Z volumes in a pool to be expanded a single disk at a time. Previously, a RAID-Z user who wanted more storage space had to add an entire new RAID-Z set of disks. вЂњThe basic ZFS building block is the pool, which is is often built using a RAID-Z volume built from five or more disks.

вЂњOn a personal note, after hearing requests for this feature for many years, IвЂ™m looking forward to working on this and grateful to the FreeBSD Foundation for making it a priority.вЂќ

This feature furthers that by making ZFSвЂ™s enterprise-grade RAID capability even easier to use, especially in smaller deployments, where itвЂ™s impractical to add a whole RAID-Z stripe at once,вЂќ said Matt Ahrens, one of the original ZFS designers. вЂњFrom day one, ZFS has been about combining enterprise functionality with ease of use.

The expansion will happen online, in the background, with zero downtime, and while maintaining the redundancy and reliability of RAID-Z. The RAID-Z Expansion project will allow OpenZFS users to incrementally add storage to their RAID pools, one device at a time. WeвЂ™ve combined our resources with iXsystems and Delphix to bring this project to fruition. The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce a collaborative project with Delphix to implement one of the most requested ZFS features, to allow RAID-Z pools to be expanded one disk at a time.

Zfs vs openzfs