Rumor: Apple Enterprise Products to use ZFS

Now we know why Apple is working on ZFS: iTV. How else are you going to get people to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on digital files that they can't backup? You have to have reliable, redundant storage. See the story http://storagemojo.com/?p=248 Means, Motive & Opportunity: Apple Kills the Media Center PC.

Oh, and they are working on it: there is a ZFS vnode in the current Leopard developer's release.

AFAIK, Apple's storage products have only found favor in non-Enterprise apps, like media production and HPC. I've watched Apple storage for many years. For a long time they only did disk quals and not too many of those. Their current products are all low-investment projects. So ZFS, which eliminates the need for RAID controllers and a lot of storage management BS, would fit well with that philosophy. And provable end-to-end data storage integrity would get favorable attention from folks who now dismiss OS X as a toy.

HFS+ is cow dung. If Apple is serious about enabling consumers to use TB's of data - coming soon to a home near you! - they need a modern FS. Maybe ZFS isn't their choice, but they have to do *something*.

Not sure what the hubbub is about apple having to "rewrite" a large portion of OS X to support ZFS. From Wikipedia:

"ZFS appears to applications as a standard POSIX file system; no application changes are needed to store data in ZFS."


More interestingly, according to quantum mechanics, it would require more energy to fill the massive capacity of a ZFS filesystem then it would to boil the oceans of the world (assuming 100% efficency, which today's computers can't even touch). Likewise, an ideal quantum storage device would have to weigh 136 billion kilograms to hold it (again, it would be exponentially higher in reality).

"Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully-populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2128 blocks (nibbles) = 2137 bytes = 2140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2140 bits) / (1031 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.

To operate at the 1031 bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc2, the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2x1028 J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4x1021 kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4x106 J/kg * 1.4x1021 kg = 3.4x1027 J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans."

Nice... MacRumors had this posted in April http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/04/20060430200158.shtml

Has everyone forgotten Apple's hiring the mind behind BeFS? Now, I'll say ZFS would be a coup for Apple in conjunction with it's XSan and XRaid products, but I just don't see it sitting under the OS. Under NAS devices? Sure. It could potentially give Apple another feather in it's cap when going toe-to-toe with EMC, HP, and the like in the mid-sized storage market.

OS X is not dependent on any file system, you could use Fat32 with OS X or NFS.  You just need to provide the proper file system plugin.  So, adding Sun's system would be just as straightforward.  XSAN is a new file system as well.

WinFS has/had little bearing on your resource management interest, it is/was a metadata management layer on top of NTFS. It is/was more in line with Spotlight then a filesytem,

As to NTFS being "creaky", it is no more so then many other filesystems. Yes, there are always exciting newer ones coming along; ext3, Rieser, ZFS, etc. but taking advantage of them throughout the OS can be complex and time-consuming and any benefit must be weighed against the transition costs.

The same couild be said for HFS+; Apple is still plumbing in support for HFS+ five years after introducing MacOS X. Adopting ZFS would require a significent rengineering, requiring drawing resources away from other projects like kernel development, a rewritten Finder, etc.

Is it possible Apple is interested in ZFS? Sure. They keep an eye on all sorts of intersting developments. Is anyone seriously expecting their adoption of it? Not particularly.

At some point Apple is likely to move beyond HFS+ to another file system. However my own guess is that won't be until they've gotten some other rough edges polished first and then they'll be adopting a substantially different architecture, not just replacing their filesystem format.

I just wanted to add that the article also seems a bit less credible and authoritative when the author doesn't use the correct product names: Xserve, Xserve RAID, and Xsan.

I wouldn't really describe OS X as "running on top of" any particular filesystem. You can install it on an HFS+ volume or a UFS volume today; ZFS would be just like UFS from that standpoint.

-jcr

I guess we'll know soon enough as WWDC is coming up in August.