Link: Sun Says File Systems are Important Differentiator

Sun Microsystems was originally known as a workstation vendor, and it became best known as a maker of servers and their associated Solaris Unix operating system. But Sun has always been an innovator in file systems as well as operating systems, and three decades of innovation has not changed that. Sun still believes that file systems matter, and its Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and the expanding role it could play in the IT industry are proof of this belief.

Given the features inside ZFS, it comes as no surprise that Sun is excited to see other companies and open source projects pick it up. According to Jeff Bonwick, who is a co-creator of ZFS with Moore and the storage chief technology officer at Sun, the open source FreeBSD variant of BSD Unix already supports ZFS in its distro and the NetBSD is adding ZFS support through Google’s Summer of Code effort, whereby Google pays young nerds to do coding for a summer job. The future “Leopard” version of MacOS X Server also has ZFS support inside of its beta versions, but it remains to be seen if the file system will make it into the final release of Apple’s server operating system.