From today's NY Times: Apple's new OS to incorporate Sun's ZFS (as an option).
--QS
June 26, 2007, 12:41 pm
Remember Macintosh?
By John Markoff
Tags: Apple, OSX, Sun Microsystems
Although it seems that the media can’t write about anything but the iPhone these days, a trickle of intriguing details about Apple’s new Leopard operating system continue to appear. One interesting technology note about the new operating system that was lost in the ten features that Steve Jobs focused on last month at the company’s World Wide Developers Conference, is a quiet deal that Apple made with Sun Microsystems. A bit of software plumbing known as the ZFS File System will appear as an option for Leopard, the next version of the Macintosh OS X, shortly after it is shipped in late October.
Why should you care? Although ZFS is a component of Sun’s Solaris version of the Unix operating system, designed by-in-large for corporate and technical computer users, it has one to-die-for feature that every PC and Mac user should care about deeply: better backups.
Even though Mr. Jobs has made a big deal out of the new Time Machine feature that will make it easy for users to back up their computers, ZFS gives Mac users an even better option.
It will make “fine grain” incremental backups possible. If you go to Best Buy or Frys and purchase a cheap external hard disk, every time you connect it to your computer, the Leopard operating system will be able to create a mirror image of all the data without copying individual files. Only the bits of data inside the files that have changed will be copied.
It’s the way backups should be done. |
