Apple has long been rumored to include support for the ZFS file system designed by Sun, with rumors dating back even before Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced in 2007 Leopard would utilize ZFS as its file system. It even made an appearance in Disk Utility in a beta of Mac OS X 10.5 (pictured right). Although ZFS support was never included in Leopard, it was also initially hinted in Snow Leopard Server documentation in 2008 before the final public release.
In 2009, Apple had seemingly ceased all work on ZFS. Today MacRumors pointed us to a 2011 Ars Technica article profiling an Apple engineer named Don Brady who worked on the ZFS team at Apple until 2009. The report noted, “Apple couldn’t reach suitable license terms with Sun” at the time, and Brady eventually left to form his own company in 2010 called Ten’s Complement. Two years later, Brady and Ten’s Complement are bringing ZFS support to Mac OS X with the company’s latest project, ZEVO Silver Edition.
The Silver Edition is just the first product from Ten’s Complement and includes basic ZFS support for $19.95. Other products will follow including a $40 Gold Edition and a Platinum Edition with support for RAIDZ and other advanced features. A Developer Edition will provide devs with “conventional ZFS command line tools,” GUI options, and customization options. As MacRumors pointed out, the MacZFS open source project is also continuing development on the original work done by Sun and Apple.
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