This is a very fascinating interview of the two guys behind ZFS, by Robert Scoble. Try to ignore the interviewer. The subjects (Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore) are damn smart guys (and one even gets up to answer his phone partway through! Must be important!)

They fit right in with my paranoia that hard drives are disasters waiting to happen. The beauty of ZFS is it tries to abstract that. Add drives, remove drives, whatever, nonvolatile storage can be as transparent as RAM. Failures too. In fact, focus on the failures! Bitwise errors or even whole drive failures are no problem with an adequate ZFS setup. Someday … sigh … someday.

“All hell can break loose on the hardware and you still get your data out.”

They haven’t found anyone willing to implement ZFS on Windoze but on Solaris, Linux and Unices, it has an intriguing future. Mac OS X Leopard client has read-only support. I bet Apple is really excited about it for Leopard Server, to start. These guys embody the idea that presenting a complex thing simply is incredibly difficult. But it has to be done. If only because one day there are smart enough guys who get fed up with the old way and they invent the future.

ZFS will save our bacon in ten years. Quoth Bill Moore: “All hardware is inherently busted. You can’t trust a darn thing they say cause they’re liars.”

I’m sure Apple’s interested. I’m sure Microsoft is not (they’d rather do it themselves worse). Apple’s only problem is how to make this work when nearly all their machines support only one internal Hard Drive. Nevertheless, I will be astonished if new Macs sold after the introduction of Mac OS X 10.6 don’t use ZFS as their default filesystem.

So despite Sun’s various idiocies and failings, let’s root for them. In 1996, some thought they would buy Apple. Nowadays will Apple buy them? (answer: no, but let’s keep them in business)

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