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Apple Discontinues ZFS Project
Zaurus writes "Apple has replaced its ZFS project page with a notice that 'The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.' Apple originally touted ZFS as a feature that would be available in Snow Leopard Server. A few months before release, all mention of ZFS was removed from the Apple web site and literature, and ZFS was notably absent from Snow Leopard Server at launch. Despite repeated attempts to get clarification about their plans from ZFS, Apple has not made any official statement regarding the matter. A zfs-macos Google group has been set up for members of Apple's zfs-discuss mailing list to migrate to, as many people had started using the unfinished ZFS port already. The call is out for developers who can continue the forked project."
Daring Fireball suggests that Apple's decision could have been motivated by NetApp's patent lawsuit over ZFS.
Posting anon, lest someone guess who my sources are.
The long and short of it was, Apple and Sun couldn't come to terms on the licensing. Sun wanted a lot of money for giving it to Apple under different terms and the amount they wanted was in the range of "hell, we could do it ourselves for that".
Add to that, the Oracle buyout and Sun going into management paralysis, and Apple decided to go it alone.
Apple's CoreOS team includes several of the lead engineers from the ZFS project (who fled the remnants of Sun in the Schwartz melt-down), and the architect of the BeFS. I'm expecting Apple to do their own next-generation file system, probably in the 10.7 timeframe.
I doubt that it's a legal issue as the primary reason that this has happened, especially considering that the project seems to have stagnated steadily in successive versions of OS X. There just doesn't seem to have been the will within the OS X development group to make this work and to support and fully integrate ZFS into the inner workings of the OS. Given the pretty extensive functionality and plumbing of ZFS its probably been too much of a big ask to integrate a filesystem like that into a desktop. They might well have come to the conclusion that ZFS was simply complete overkill on a desktop and that it just wasn't possible.
However, they still desperately need a next generation filesystem and according to the linked article they're hiring filesystem engineers. I don't see any evidence that this was anything other than a technical avenue that they've explored that has fallen by the wayside as so many have before.
Leaving aside all the crazy storage pool stuff (great for servers, not necessarily that useful for desktops), there are some interesting features in ZFS that I hope make their way into Mac OS X in some filesystem.
Snapshots and Copy-On-Write filesystem clones seem like a great way to improve the Time Machine backup feature, and would make it easy for applications to provide backup-on-save very efficiently.
The compression and encryption features would likely be useful for some people. I don't think the increased filesystem limits (number of files, size of files) would matter for most folks.
I suggest you drop MacOS like a hot potato, send a nastygram to Apple giving them a piece of your mind, and check out both OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. They both support ZFS, OpenSolaris because Sun invented ZFS, and FreeBSD because they have competent management AND engineering. Unlike certain others (and I'm not pointing the finger at linux).
Once again, FreeBSD has shown the fools in Cupertino how it's done.
You're saying CRT's never had tearing? My LCD has a 85Hz refresh rate, and it was cheap. You seem to be remembering CRT's as having infinite refresh speed for some reason. Hell, the fact that CRT's actually *blank* and LCD's don't makes CRT's far worse as that particular family of artifact goes.
As for color gamut, yeah the cheap one isn't quite up to it. But LED TV's are out now tho and they have a gamut that's bigger than any CRT ever was. That'll be coming to monitors real soon now.
Grab a small SSD for apps/games and a 5400RPM terabyte disk for all your music/movies/series/home video/whatever. 64/80GB disks seems to be the sweetspot now, which even leaves some space for apps after installing Win7 ;)
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For the reason I stated: That using Sun's ZFS left them without control of development, and tracking an outside codebase has reputational risks to which Apple in particular is averse. Having ex-Sun people work on a new filesystem is great, but they still need to navigate the patent minefield that Sun has sown around ZFS.
Interesting that Sun non-competes did not stop their engineers walking down the street to work on directly competitive technology... (First I heard that engineers left Sun for Apple, actually. I thought the ZFS team was quite small, and it is obvious from the list that the key people remain at Sun.)
you had me at #!
Yeah, but a lot of people don't need terabytes worth of storage. I just built a machine for my wife with a 64 Gb SSD, which cost $180. She's currently only using about 25% of the space. The good thing is that the machine is really fast on some tasks she does that require a lot of hard-disk access.
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SATA attach SSD has achieved price parity with enterprise SAS, the density is almost there, and the performance completely blows it away. We're not at the end of spinning disc, but you can see it from here.
The new performance tier of storage is PCIe attach SSD. At two terabytes of storage and 1.5GB/s per slot, we're getting close to what we used to get from Ramdisk in performance and adequate density at 3TB per rack unit including server (HP DL785 G5 or equivalent). Yes, this is expensive right now, but the performance tier always has been. This is for trading platforms, HPC and such. These are approaching 2M IOPS and 40TB per 7U server.
The second tier is 2.5" 256GB SATA SSDs. You get 3TB per rack unit including the server. About the same cost as SAS for 10x the performance. Software options enable you to scale this to infinity in both bulk and performance. Great for databases, VMDK files and iSCSI. Get the hot-swap version and leave some open bays so that when the 1TB 2.5" SSDs come out you can migrate your LUNS with no downtime.
The third tier is SAS spinning disk. At something like 20TB/Rack unit (excluding servers) you can use this to serve frequently used files.
The fourth tier now is SATA spinning disk. At roughly the same density as SAS spinning disk for one-fourth the cost, this is a good candidate for deduplicated targets like virtual tape libraries or deduplicated NAS. It's also a good place to store your snapshots. With modern snapshot technologies there's no good reason to not store snaps every 15 minutes or so. Typically you would park this storage offsite for DR purposes so you can avoid the Premium Microsoft danger eXperience(**).
Storage pros probably would note that I neglected to mention tape and Fiber Channel. That's neither accident nor ignorance. The only reason for tape is legally mandated tape backups, and I consider this the IT equivalent of legally mandated hitching posts outside every business (which laws persist in some places) - if you gotta, you gotta, but there's no reason any more to consider it a necessary or good practice. As for Fiber Channel, it just doesn't fit in the model any more. I know this hurts the feelings of folks who just dropped a million bucks for a single rack of SAN storage with 100TB, or worse - popped for the new 8GBit stuff complete with a converged ethernet/FCoE solution, but it's true. There's just no reason for fiber channel any more. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to support a modern storage solution and it costs too much. Sure, it's got redundancy from the disc to the file server, but so what: modern file servers use redundant storage and clustered redundancy and don't need the diminishing returns of embarassingly expensive drives, head nodes, capacity licensing and annual support contracts. By the time you figure in oversubscribed ports in your FC network, you've lost the supposed reliable performance benefit of the whole thing. This isn't bad news for Cisco - they're going to sell a lot of 10Gbit Ethernet ports before they get cheap and they haven't lost anything by being also compatible with FC. It really bites to be EMC this week, but they'll figure it out.
Check the specs on this server, this card, this drive and this array. This is off-the-shelf stuff, not pie in the sky. The interconnect people need to get off their butts, but this is all doable right now. The compute side becomes an almost trivial cost of what it takes to maintain this storage bandwidth and capacity. If you like proprietary solutions HP sells a thing called the LeftHand Virtual San App
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One small problem is that HFS+ sits on top of HFS and thinks like block allocations fall apart after 1TB. Apple has to switch filesystems. While the problems aren't severe at 2TB or 4TB at 50TB they are going to devastating.