(credit: Canonical)
A new long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu is coming out in April, and Canonical just announced a major addition that will please anyone interested in file storage. Ubuntu 16.04 will include the ZFS filesystem module by default, and the OpenZFS-based implementation will get official support from Canonical.
ZFS support was already available "as a technology preview" in Ubuntu 15.10, where it's installable via an apt-get command and has to be compiled from source code first. This is no longer the case in 16.04, though you'll still need to download and install the zfsutils-linux package to create and manage ZFS volumes. Putting an official, installed-by-default, fully supported version into an LTS version of Ubuntu is a big vote of confidence, especially since people running Ubuntu-based servers often stick to LTS releases for maximum stability.
ZFS is used primarily in cases where data integrity is important—it's designed not just to store data but to continually check on that data to make sure it hasn't been corrupted. The oversimplified version is that the filesystem generates a checksum for each block of data. That checksum is then saved in the pointer for that block, and the pointer itself is also checksummed. This process continues all the way up the filesystem tree to the root node, and when any data on the disk is accessed, its checksum is calculated again and compared against the stored checksum to make sure that the data hasn't been corrupted or changed. If you have mirrored storage, the filesystem can seamlessly and invisibly overwrite the corrupted data with correct data.
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