Apple's ZFS

It's Sun's ZFS, of course, but I've been tracking news of Apple's implementation of Sun's Zettabyte File System, and I'm not the only one.

French blogger Blaese thinks the main limitation now is the UI: that you have to access it as root from the command line. He also thinks that there's some confusion in Appleland over pools and volumes and disks.

I wonder if Sun didn't sow seeds of confusion by naming it the Zettabyte File System when it's not a file system. That's what Tom Yaeger said when he called it "nearly perfect" and said it was "limitlessly flexible" and "easy enough for a child to manage."

Even before Leopard was released, Gregg Keizer was speculating that ZFS could be Apple's secret weapon. Of course that was shortly after Jonathan Schwartz misled everyone about what Apple was going to do with ZFS. Gregg pointed out back then that Sun was already apparently regretting the name and, IBM-like, asking people to treat ZFS as a name and not an acronym.

Schwartz thinks ZFS is a big deal. One company that agrees, but considers it a big legal deal, is NetApp, which has sued Sun, claiming that ZFS rips off NetApp's patented technology. Sigh.

ZFS is indeed a big deal. If you don't know all about it, check out Sun's introduction. And for Apple's implementation, you might start with the man page.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 12:40 PM  Permalink