By Chetan Kumar
Resilient File System (ReFS) is the new file system for the next generation of Windows Operating Systems. This file system is introduced with Windows Server 2012 Operating system and is designed to overcome the shortcomings or issues that were faced in NTFS (New Technology File System), a prominently used file system so far. Future version of Microsoft Operating Systems and the applications (Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) has the added support for ReFS.
Why Use ReFS?
The large customer base that relies on Windows OS for running business applications wants a cost-effective and reliable platform that provides data availability and data integrity. As the amount of data required for operating businesses is increasing, there is a need to scale efficiently across different workloads. ReFS is better than NTFS in many ways. The most important advantage that comes with the new file system is “Resiliency”. This file system is built by reusing the code from NTFS engine to maintain high degree of compatibility with features of NTFS carried forward in ReFS.
Key Features
- Integrity: ReFS helps to ensure detection of all forms of disk corruptions
- Availability: ReFS gives priority to the availability of data. This implies that if some corruption occurs, the repair process focuses on the corrupt area and does not require the disk to be taken offline for repair. It performs all repairs online.
- Scalability: As the volume of data has grown enormously in today’s world, ReFS is designed to work efficiently with large sets of data without compromising on performance.
- Proactive Error Correction: ReFS proactively works in the background by running the integrity scanner periodically and initiates the repair of corrupt data.
ReFS has the capability to help customers store data, irrespective of the reliability of the underneath stacks (hardware and software). This minimizes the storage cost and reduces capital expenditures for businesses. Customers can deploy a Windows based file server attached to inexpensive storage like JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). Further, the deployments can include failover clustering, which uses a shared JBOD storage configuration.
Conclusion
ReFS is the new file system, which is believed to replace NTFS in the upcoming releases of the Windows Operating Systems and Application Software. It brings major improvements in terms of data integrity and reliability, which ensures that corrupt data is easily found and repaired. Hence, ReFS can be a widely used file system in the future that could reduce the total cost of ownership on Windows Servers.
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