ZFS offers an impressive amount of features even putting aside its hybrid nature (both a filesystem and a volume manager -- zvol) covered in detail on Wikipedia. One of the most fundamental points to keep in mind about ZFS is it targets a legendary reliability in terms of preserving data integrity. ZFS uses several techniques to detect and repair (self-healing) corrupted data. Simply speaking it makes an aggressive use of checksums and relies on data redundancy, the price to pay is a bit more CPU processing power. However, the Wikipedia article about ZFS also mention it is strongly discouraged to use ZFS over classic RAID arrays as it can not control the data redundancy, thus ruining most of its benefits.