Open source file system raises storage limits and promises better data integrity

Apple is planning to use Sun Microsystems' Zettabyte File System (ZFS) for its OS X operating system, Sun employee Eric Kustartz said on an OpenSolaris mailing list.

"Chris Emura, the Filesystem Development Manager within Apple's CoreOS organization is interested in porting ZFS to OS X," Kustartz wrote in a posting last week.

"Speaking for the zfs team (at Sun), this is great news and we fully support the effort."

Apple didn't return a request for additional information. The company as a policy doesn't comment on products before they are released.

A file system determines how data is structured and stored on a hard drive or series of hard drives.

The ZFS is the world's first 128-bit file system, providing 18 billion times the storage capacity of a current generation 64-bit system.

ZFS promises a better data integrity through a combination of features. The technology does not overwrite data on a disk like current generation file systems, but saves the new data first and then deletes the information that it replaces. This prevents data loss in the case of a system outage.

The file system also has built in checks designed to prevent data corruption.

Sun Microsystems launched the technology last November as part of OpenSolaris. The company at the time said that ZFS would be made available as part of Solaris, the commerical version of the operating system by May 2006.

Sun has made the technology available under the open source Common Distribution and Development License, allowing developers to use it in other products such as OS X free of charge, and without having to release the source code if they make any adjustments.