Now that Sun is being quoted as saying that the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard) will use ZFS, I thought to read a bit more about What is ZFS?:
“ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.”
But, that sounds kind of familiar. I remember language a lot like that in describing Plan 9. [also] I’m not finding the exact language that I remember, but I think it was in relation to the idea of network transparency and union directories:
“Plan 9 also introduced the idea of union directories, directories that combine resources across different media or across a network, binding transparently to other directories.” [via]
So, I find myself wondering how then are ZFS and Plan 9 alike and how are they different, and is there a genetic or thought relationship between them?
Well, that’s a blast from the past. I haven’t thought about Plan 9 for a long time. I still wish I’d been able to get it running on my old NeXT boxen, but that never happened.