FAA using ZFS

Quote from eWeek.com:

The embattled FAA, which has suffered a number of embarrassing flight-plan system crashes this year, has upgraded its legacy internal business systems to a new open-systems server and storage infrastructure supplied by Sun Microsystems and an IP network provided by Cisco Systems. If all goes as planned, this architecture may replace critical systems that directly affect all air travelers in the United States.

The most recent example of this happened on Aug. 26, when a corrupt file entered the flight plan system and brought it down for about 90 minutes during a high-traffic period late in the day on the East Coast. This was not an isolated incident, as the FAA’s chief administrator originally had told the media. Similar crashes occurred on Aug. 21 and in June, FAA records show.

Sun’s open-source OpenSolaris/ZFS/SunFire server/Thumper storage infrastructure—which features built-in, state-of-the-art virtualization capability—was a key building block on which the FAA IT evaluation group settled. Some of the new software is already being used in the air traffic system; ZFS (Sun’s open-source Zettabyte File System) is being used in the FAA’s air traffic data center.

“The FAA uses a large quantity of Sun Solaris servers in a variety of configurations to support some of our noncritical business applications,” Andy Isaksen, manager of the Communications Infrastructure Engineering Team for NADIN and architect of the original mainframe system, said. “ZFS is being used on at least one service within the Air Traffic Organization Enterprise Data Center.”

See the full story here at eWeek.com: How the FAA Is Bringing Its Air Traffic Systems into the 21st Century

For ZFS Home Fileserver articles see here: A Home Fileserver using ZFS. Alternatively, see related articles in the following categories: ZFS, Storage, Fileservers, NAS.

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