It all started with Sun CEO Jonathon Schwartz saying that Apple will announce “ZFS is the filesystem in Mac OS X”. Now, the rumors have been hot for a while on ZFS being included as an option in Leopard, but no one in any real position of authority has been willing to say it. He doesn’t say that ZFS is the default, but the word “the” is an interesting choice.
Marc Hamilton, Sun’s VP of Solaris Marketing, made this suggestion even stronger:
Jonathan noted that Apple will announce this week that the ZFS file system from OpenSolaris will become Apple’s new default file system. So how does that help Sun? It is pretty simple, now every Apple developer will know ZFS and how to use it on products like our SunFire x4500 storage server and other Sun products.
Then he backpeddled:
I don’t know Apple’s product plans for Leopard so it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate for me to confirm anything.
Then he changed the text to remove that “default” tidbit. So, we had lukewarm confirmation, followed by a hot confirmation, followed by another blast of cool water. We’ll just have to wait until WWDC to see what Apple says. Regardless, inclusion of ZFS is a very positive thing for even the most casual user.
The high points are being able to arbitrarily add disks to grow a file system, a huge address space, self healing capabilities, and even snapshotting to back up to a previous state. For a consumer, it means less management headaches when it comes to storage. For geeks, it means advanced control of your filesystem. I’m rooting for it.
I speculate that Apple and Sun have worked out a major partnership agreement. Read about it in my blog http://speculational.blogspot.com