Dru Lavigne will be giving a talk at SCALE 12X on "ZFS 101." The SCALE Team caught up with her and asked her to expand on the presentation.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: Hello, I'm Dru Lavigne. I'm currently the lead technical writer at iXsystems, an open source solutions provider and the corporate sponsor of the FreeNAS and PC-BSD open source projects. I've been a FreeBSD user since 1997 and have taught and written about FreeBSD and its derivatives since 1999.
Q: You're giving a talk on "ZFS 101." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: ZFS has been around for a while and provides a lot of compelling features for both storage and desktop/server use. However, it does have a learning curve and traditionally required the user to be comfortable with the command line. The FreeNAS and PC-BSD projects have created a suite of utilities that make it very easy to correctly configure a system for ZFS and to easily perform tasks such as automatic snapshot creation, restoration of previous versions of files, and restoring the system to a previous state. This talk will provide an overview of ZFS features and demonstrate the graphical tools for utilizing these features.
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: Definitely not my first In fact, it looks like this will be my 10th SCALE. What can I say? SCALE is great! The people are friendly, there's lots of great talks, the expo is fun, and it's a great excuse to be in L.A. in the winter.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: Nope, other than that I hope to see you at SCALE. Be sure to drop by the FreeBSD booth to say hi and to pick up some great swag.
[SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero]