Is it a forgotten project? A fit of open-source pique? Or is it just that everyone got really busy on other stuff? Looks like Apple has just shut down the ZFS project for Mac OS X. The site for the project on Mac OS Forge reads:

ZFS Project Shutdown
2009-10-23

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

It's hinted that this was caused by legal issues surrounding the merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, which caused Apple to back away from the next-generation file system technology. After many rumors, including ZFS support that was going to be added in Snow Leopard Server, but that ended up being removed in the final version, it now seems like the saga of ZFS on Mac OS X is ending with a whimper.

[via Daring Fireball]

Many people forget that Apple makes 2 variants of OS X for Macs: client (that's the one you run on your personal Mac) and Server (which is normally found on a server, oddly enough). We've already posted (twice) about the client version of Snow Leopard, but what about Apple's next iteration of their server product?

Head on over to the Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard page that Apple just put up, and you'll find out a thing or two about what your Mac server will be serving up in about a year or so. Amongst the new features we find:

• iCal Server 2: Adds group and shared calendars as well as a way to invite non-iCal Server users to meetings and events. Also includes a web app to let people access their calendars on the go.
• Podcast Producer 2: This little known Apple app makes creating content and getting it into the iTunes Store a snap. This version looks like it adds a number of great features including support for recording both the presenter and the presentation they are giving and a way to locally host your podcasts.
• Address Book Server: This new component lets you share contacts across machines, as well as create a central Address Book without having to have an LDAP server.
• ZFS: The long rumored addition of Sun's file-system is finally coming to OS X Server. Snow Leopard will be able to both read and write to ZFS volumes.

All in all, Snow Leopard Server seems to add quite a few new features.

Thanks, Nate.

Remember when Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, told an audience that OS X would be sporting ZFS as the file system of choice and that we would find out all about it at WWDC? It would seem no one told Apple that, as the Stevenote came and went with nary a mention of ZFS or Sun. InformationWeek caught up with Brian Croll, Apple's senior director of product marketing for Mac OS X, and asked about ZFS on the Mac. Croll said, "ZFS is not happening," and that HFS+ is the default.

It is unclear if Leopard will still support ZFS as an option, but it is clear that the default is still HSF+.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Update: ZFS is still an option in Leopard, it is just not the default. I've updated the headline to reflect this.

The French site Mac4Ever appears to have found evidence (in the newest developer release) that Leopard will include the ZFS file system to supplement HFS+. What is ZFS you ask, and why should you care? Well ZFS is a pretty darn cool next generation file system created by Sun that includes a variety of cool new features for protecting your data (if any file system features can properly be called "cool"). John Siracusa over at arstechnica has written about ZFS several times, rather excitedly. I'll let him explain what the excitement is about:

"ZFS does away with the old restrictions on volume size and scope, while also addressing data integrity and performance issues, all from a purely software perspective. (Like one slide says, "ZFS loves cheap disks!")

The end game is a world where storage-even personal storage-actually behaves like the magically intelligent, infinitely expandable cloud that we'd all like to think it is, and less like those temperamental little cylinders (to use some diagram-speak, if I may). It's daring, free-thinking stuff."

If this is true and ZFS is in fact shipping with Leopard, it may go a long way towards explaining how Time Machine will work in the final release, despite the fact that in the original developer release Time Machine did not use ZFS. It would be yet another example of Apple being out on the edge and leading the mainstream PC industry (linux hackers don't count) forward.

[Via Digg through OSNews]

In the last 12 months, the storage demand at my workplace (a university of 10,000 students) has risen exponentially. The 2.4TB NAS purchased last summer was outstripped by the end of our second semester just a few weeks ago. We'll recover a lot of that space by deep-sixing unused and stale accounts--which we can do every semester--but this does not address the growing problem of long-term storage and archival of data generated by our students, faculty, and staff. Eventually, we'll need to figure out a way to keep some--if not most--of this data indefinitely. The good news is that storage costs continue to decline--one terabyte of data storage is about $1500-$2000 right now. The bad news is that managing these massive amounts of data only continues to get more and more complex.

Microsoft's answer to this problem is WinFS, a new filesystem and storage manager that was to be included in Vista. WinFS would be the solution to some of these storage problems by providing a scalable filesystem built on top of a relational database. WinFS would have allowed for metadata tagging, datastore consolidation and sophisticated backup/restore, notifications, and access rules (ACL's). It's exactly what the Enterprise market needs right now, a sophisticated and stable solution for this growing problem. The problem is that Microsoft has yanked WinFS from Vista and will only be using pieces of it in Vista's Server version. Vista will run on the increasing old and creaky NTFS.

Some industry experts are suggesting that Apple may include the open source ZFS file system/content manager in their upcoming Leopard Server. ZFS was produced at Sun Microsystems about two years ago and was recently integrated into the most recent version of Solaris 10. An employee at Sun has posted to the Mac OS X Server mailing list that Apple may be interested in porting Mac OS X to run on ZFS.

If it's true that Apple may build Leopard Server to run on top of ZFS (instead of HFS+), it would place them in a strong position in the Enterprise market. Apple's X-Serve, X-RAID, and X-SAN are already some of the most affordable enterprise-level storage products on the market. Having a new, fast, scalable, reliable file system and content management system combined with Apple's traditionally easy-to-use admin tools might give Apple a powerful push into the coveted Enterprise storage market.