ReFS is Abbreviation of Resilient File System.

It is a new file system which Microsoft is launching with the new Windows Server 8, it is aimed to improve the performance by changing certain basics of the underlying file system.

Microsoft has not yet officially declared its system requirements, but some of expected / known features from the new file system are as follows:

Compatibility: Microsoft announced that the new system would be compatible easily with the existing APIs and File system. It would give support to BitLocker, Symbolic Links, Volume Snapshots, File Ids etc. It would enhance the data mirroring and data stripping process and will help in sharing data pools. It will also help in detecting corrupted files while mirroring process.

Resiliency: The new system will be much more robust than the earlier one and will adopt allocation-on-write strategy for meta data. The new mechanism will ease the work of Network Administrators as they will not have to perform CHKDSK error checks on regular basis, since the mechanism detects and even provides facility to drop corrupted files while taking backups.

Reliability: The new system also uses B+ trees for the data structures, metadata & file data. File size, etc details have maximum size of 16 Exhibytes whereas number of directories are confined to 64 bit numbers. This mechanism increases scalability and the data organization is done to make the performance robust, which also somewhat resembles to relational databases system. Unicode Text strings are used for maintaining record of hierarchy of names and directories.

This system fully supports ipv4 and ipv6 formats of ip-addresses, and adds on features to Hyper V , naming a few out of them would be cloud backup, storage resource pool etc. It only requires processor that supports SLAT. High number of virtual machines can be active per host, as high as 1024 and up to 4000 per cluster, hence network maintenance would become cheaper and easier.

The installation process is simpler and provides command line & GUI support. The task manager is now changed and now provides detailed information up to NUMA node and also graphs for better visualization. Information about startups have also been provided, hence managing startups is now much handier. Heavy Utilization of resources is shown by Blue color.

The Active Directory is made more sensitive and now recognizes any change resulting from virtualization, and clones virtualization safely. Up gradation would be made smoother and simpler, more power-shell commands would be released which would make job of Network Administrators easier.

Overall, a seems a good step by MS, specially to woo the Network Administrators, hence a good acceptance in the market can be very well expected.

Good Luck 🙂