6 matchs for zfs:
Rumors that IBM might buy Sun. I'm generally skeptical about huge deals like this. But I definitely want the cool Sun technology - especially ZFS - to stick around and mature. And if that means IBM needs to buy them then I'm good with that.
ZFS for OS X is now available. Doesn't boot yet but everything else is a go. Wow. If this actually works as it's described it is so amazingly cool I can't believe it.
I'm really curious how this will turn out. Usually when someone says "I'm going to to really rethink this problem and just start from scratch" it is not a good idea. Especially if the complexity of the project is high. And building a filesystem is just stupendously complex. So you'd think these guys would have a very high chance at failing. And yet maybe they did it?
Inside Baseball Apple bit: I wonder if there is an internal tension between the ZFS people and the Time Machine team. I'm sure Time Machine is some impressive work (seeing as it works on HFS,) but you pretty much get it all for free with ZFS!
Still, it's a lot of risk to move to a new filesystem. Even if everything goes perfect I'd be surprised if Apple moved to it before 2009. And maybe it won't ever make it (or maybe only on OS X Server.) You really have to test and be 200% sure.
Apparently Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz just let slip that Apple is going to ship ZFS as "the filesystem" in Leopard. Not sure why he wouldn't say "default filesystem" if that was what he meant, but on the other hand, it's hard to imagine "the filesystem" meaning anything other than "default filesystem." If true maybe this has something to do with Lepard's delay? And I wonder if the idea of pooling in ZFS might help out with mouting and connecting (and then sometimes disconnecting) a lot of disparate media storage devices (macs, ipods, apple tvs, iphones) into one home storage cloud? Anyway, I've been following ZFS for a while, but I'm truely surprised by the speed of this development. Can't wait to check it out.
I've posted before about ZFS, Sun's seemingly amazing open source file system. I have some fairly large (couple TB) ext3 partitions running on hardware RAID5 under linux, and while I've never had any issues <knocking on wood> I've always felt like there must be a better way. And if the ZFS hype is true then it sounds like that better way. Although I guess these things are always open to reevaluation upon inspection.
Still, I'm pretty skeptical these days, and ZFS really does sound great. And now the rumors are that Mac OS X 10.5 (probably announced in January, shipping in March/April) will have ZFS support. Interesting. It almost seems too advanced for the home user, except the whole zpools stuff really makes sense. And it's very Apple. Want more space? Just plug in another hard drive. No fussing with it, or choosing parameters; and it doesn't show up as a separate drive or anything complicated like that; you just get that much more storage added to your pool of storage. Kind of like how you might think it would work if you didn't know too much about how it actually works.
Seems like Sun is really kicking butt lately. A year ago I wouldn't have believed it, but that just shows again how little I know. First they released a sub $1000 SunFire X2100 1U server that looks really sweet. And now plans have been revealed for a massive storage monster called Thumper:
The 4U high system will hold two dual-core Opterons and support up to 16GB of memory. A more unique part of the server will be Sun's use of 48 SATA drives.Holy cow. And the key to utilizing all that storage is a new filesystem, ZFS, that will be included in Solaris 10. ZFS sounds *really* amazing. The sort of thing that might make someone consider some really expensive Sun gear. Only now their gear isn't expensive any more. Lookin' good Sun.