It’s official: ZFS in Mac OS 10.6 server
Can single-user OS X be far behind?
Here’s the official Apple announcement:
For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots.
The StorageMojo take
Cool! And only 2 years later than I’d predicted. I’m an optimist.
As I noted almost 2 years ago:
StorageMojo.com has devoted time to this issue because today’s computer business is largely driven by consumer computing, not enterprise computing. Putting a really modern integrated file and storage management system on a consumer OS would raise the bar for everyone else.
I stand by that.
Comments welcome, of course.
For more on ZFS see:
Want to know more about ZFS? I’ve been hot on it for over a year. See:
on June 21st, 2008 at 9:39 am
Is ZFS destined to be the perpetual technology of the future?
Sun invented ZFS, and has full-page ads in trade rags touting ZFS, but sells only one product (x4500) that makes good use of ZFS. Want to run ZFS on another kind of Sun server? Sorry, you’re looking at second-tier or third-tier storage vendors unless you want to pay extra for an unused, potentially problematic RAID controller.
A year from now, you’ll be able to run ZFS on Apple Mac OS X server (Snow Leopard). Who will you buy the storage subsystem from? If Apple decides to get back into the storage game with JBOD SAS (the sweet spot in the market right now), could enterprise customers trust that Apple won’t terminate that product with extreme prejudice — after seeing what happened to XServe RAID?
To quote a local radio pundit “Sometimes I wonder, other times I’m sure.”
on June 21st, 2008 at 11:34 am
So does ZFS compare with the Single-Level Storage that IBM implemented in their
System/38 –>AS/400–>eServer System i–>iServer –> System i Operating System ? It certainly is a more recent design, since the System/38 was sold around 1983. SLS implemented a RAID system with the hardware/software of the System/38, but the latest incarnation runs on the same hardware as IBM’s AIX machines.
I have experienced unseen data corruption on NTFS: it is why Vista SP1 failed to install on a 4 month old Dell Inspiron 530s. The service pack from Windows Update wanted to patch existing files with new data - but the original files were corrupt. Instead of stopping and backing out, the SP software just looped. Totally locked out of the system. I ended up restoring a three-month old system image, downloading the 455 MB Service Pack, and using it to install to Vista SP1. Totally incompetent.
on June 27th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Sandy, I have complete confidence in Sun’s ability to screw up a good thing, so you may be right. Nonetheless, Apple has smart file system guys and a narrower target market. I think they’ll do just fine.
Milton, System 38 took virtual memory to the logical extreme with the single level store. ZFS isn’t doing that - it is a file system accessed like other file systems. Its combination of file system and volume management though does simplify storage management - just as SLS does on System 38 et.al.
Over on ZDnet I’ve gotten lots of comments from the Windows faithful that they’ve never seen data corruption. Many, methinks, have, but didn’t recognize it as such: just a glitch.
Robin