Apple denies use of ZFS in Leopard

Apple will not use Sun's ZFS file system in its upcoming Leopard OS, despite claims to the contrary by the inventor of ZFS, Sun.

Sun's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz told a conference last Wednesday that Apple was going to use ZFS in Leopard, the next incarnation of Mac OS X. "In fact, this week you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developers Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS X," he said.

But this Tuesday, Brian Croll, Apple's senior director of Mac OS X product marketing, said Schwartz's claims were incorrect. He told Information Week: "ZFS is not happening."

This has caused embarrassment for the companies, as both faced the spectacle of two senior executives disagreeing publicly over the direction of an important operating system.

Acting quickly on Tuesday, Apple tried to clarify matters with another statement. The company wanted to make it clear that there was no implication Sun's ZFS would be the main file system for Leopard. Talking to Information Week, Croll explained: "ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard. We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS — a read-only copy of ZFS — in Leopard."

ZFS is a 128-bit open-source file system that was originally built for Sun's Solaris operating system.