ZFS in Apple's forthcoming Snow Leopard Mac OS

Apple will support Sun's ZFS file system in Mac OS X v10.6, called 'Snow Leopard, due out in 12 months time.

Apple's Snow Leopard web page states 'For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots."

The general direction of the Snow Leopard release is to provide better support for multi-core processors through Grand Central technology, improve Mac OS X' performance, upgrade the collaboration facilities, and greatly improve interoperability with Microsoft's Windows Exchange product. Support for 64-bit kernel technology enables main memory to scale to 16TB.

Snow Leopard is also supposed to reduce the amount of hard drive storage space needed for its own files, presumably by not storing PPC code on Intel Macs and vice versa.

In March Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Apple would support ZFS in Mac OS X but didn't get much public support from Apple. ZFS support in Snow Leopard vindicates Schwartz's stance. Nothing is written in stone though and things could change between now and Snow Leopard shipping.

With NetApp and Sun locked in law suits over Sun's open sourcing of ZFS there may be some form of indeminity arrangement bwetween Apple and Sun.