TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Apple & ZFS: Investigating SAN’s & Home Media Servers?

The big inference that people seem to be missing this morning comes from this quote:

“ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard. We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS — a read-only copy of ZFS — in Leopard.” [from: InfoWeek]

So - Apple, the king of digital media, is experimenting with a new and exciting file system designed for large storage solutions. What could they be up to? How about a consumer home-media SAN that also can be talked to over the Internet? Something synchronizes/shares/connects your desktop, laptop, Apple TV, iPhone, and iPod and acts as a DVR, backup solution, and streaming media server.

It could be software running on any desktop Leopard machine. Or, it could be a hardware solution. Anyway - that’s my guess: ZFS is positioning Apple to release a stopgap SAN-for-homes that can handle media until broadband is truly ubiquitous and all of your media can be stored in the cloud.

apple, leopard, san, sun zfs

Apple, Sun, Vista, and ZFS

A few days back, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz made an announcement about Sun’s next-gen file system (ZFS) being one of the key features of Apple OSX Leopard. Today, Apple rejected that sound bite, claiming HFS+ (from 1998) is still the order of the day.

First point: this reminds me a lot of Windows Vista and the whole WinFS debacle. Its amazing how much trouble filesystems seem to give OS manufacturers.

Second point: How does one have so severe a disconnect between major companies that embarrassing PR situations like this take place?

I’m not much of a geek, but one thing that does get me excited is file systems. Speed, searchability, security, reliability - all of these are tied to your FS, and ZFS seems to offer great advantages for each. So - I wish Apple or MS would get to it already.

apple, filesystem, hfs, microsoft, os, sun, techmeme, winfs zfs