“Finally, a modern file system on a consumer OS,” Robin Harris blogs for ZDNet. “As if Grand Central weren’t enough bad news for Microsoft, now they have ZFS to contend with. Building a reliable, high-performance file system takes years and Microsoft doesn’t have years to respond.”
MacDailyNews Note: Snow Leopard will deliver unrivaled support for multi-core processors with “Grand Central,” making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Find out more about Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard here and Mac OS X Snow Leopard here.
“The formal announcement is for Snow Leopard server, which is how Apple introduces new file systems. HFS+ first arrived on a server version as well,” Harris writes.
“Who cares? Anyone who stores data should,” Harris writes. “Microsoft’s NTFS is 20 year old technology borrowed from DEC. Fine for small disks and puny CPUs. Not so great for today’s data intensive systems and applications.”
“For all of Microsoft’s fine talk about innovation they don’t do squat unless someone else does it first,” Harris writes.
“ZFS always knows if the block is correct and/or corrupt… the entire data store is self-validating. You’ll never have to wonder if all your data is correct again. It is,” Harris explains.
“ZFS eliminates the whole volume concept. Add a disk or five to your system and it joins your storage pool. More capacity. Not more management,” Harris explains.
“It would be nice if Microsoft were driving innovation and reliability, but – like General Motors – they prefer to rest of their laurels. And like General Motors, they are facing a long and painful decline if they don’t get their act together,” Harris writes.
MacDailyNews Take: Too late.
Harris continues, “GM says they are proud that 1 in 4 cars sold in America are GM – but the number used to be 3 out of 5. Microsoft is rightfully proud of their 90% market share. But that share can change – as it has for IE – and they have nowhere to go but down. As users we benefit from the competition. Kudos to Apple for bringing the latest technology to consumers.”
Much more, including links to more info about ZFS, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “winski” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Back on ,January 10, 2005, we took a bit of flack from some readers for our Take, in which we have always believed and therefore reprint here:
As we have always said, even as many short-sightedly waved (and continue to wave) the white flag, the war is not over. And, yes, we shall prevail. For the naysayers: In 1929, Ford held just over 61% of the U.S. market for automobiles. GM’s market share stood at just 12%. Ford was thought to be invincible, with GM regarded as a niche auto maker. Probably, some analyst at the time said, “The reality is, long term, GM will always be a niche player.” But, in 1936, just seven years later, Ford held just 22% of the market for new automobiles while General Motors held a 43% share. No company is invincible. Not even Microsoft.
“‘And like General Motors, they are facing a long and painful decline if they don’t get their act together,’ Harris writes.”
If?
The Emperor is officially naked.
Snow Leopard sounds better and better despite no whiz-bang surface features. It really seems as if it will be setting the stage for a new level of computing by squeezing out as much performance as possible from hardware.
Good stuff.
oh i know a lot of IT guys that have a brand new opinion of Apple in the last 2 years, and this article is dead on, Grand Central plus ZFS equals uber-server…..
There is a site, The Truth About Cars, that pretty much paints a picture that GM is soon to collapse & die. Ah, if only M$ was in such bad shape.
Sounds like this is for the “server” version only. 🙁
Who gave you flack, MDN?
We want names!
Proof positive that MS is a follower and not an innovator. They are getting further behind the eight ball and their time has come – TO DIE A CORPORATE DEATH!
…but where is all the enterprise SOFTWARE development for Mac? That will REALLY put the nails in the coffin.
ZFS… Grand Central… Mail and Contacts server.. Virtualization… iPhone integration… Next stop: Enterprise.
Oh, and that “Microsoft is rightly proud of their 90% market share”? Bonnie and Clyde were also proud of all the banks they robbed. And we all know how Microsoft got their 90%.
I’ve been planning for a while to invest in OSX Server for home development, (even just a Mac Mini with OSX Server installed). Once Snow Leopard comes out I will be getting a server, this will be awesome to develop on!
I was happy when announced that Snow Leopard would focus more on speed than features. It’s a problem that most software companies come up against – to sell a new version, they need more features. ‘Feature-creep’ is a bad thing for software, because you end up with a product that used to do 5 things very well, but now does 300 things not very well.
I can’t wait for Snow Leopard. Speed is the order of the day!
zfs has been out for solaris for years
I really don’t like the GM analogy here. FORD would have been a better example of an American company with large market share that has failed to innovate. My Dad/Family were ford/lincoln/mercury people, but failed behind in the late ’90s producing that awful Taurus and totally dropped the ball with Lincoln. GM however has produced some awesome products as of late, including the new CTS that’s on par with the Germans, the Malibu, Staturn Sky, Vue, Outlook, Volt, OnStar… if any American car company is inovating it’s GM…. really bad analogy here… plus Microsoft is a partner with Ford – go figure.
Grand Central is making quad-core iMacs feasible. And possibly quad-core MBP’s. Battery? Just run 2 cores when on battery; run all four when plugged in.
Can you see a quad-core iMac or MBP running SL (that’s Snow Leopard for all NAP (non-acronym people)) compared with any generic (non-Mac) hardware running anything from Microsoft?
Game over man!
“No company is invincible. Not even Microsoft.”
Nor was-
Sears
K-Mart
Safeway
Mont. Ward
A&P;And eventually Wal-Mart.
I just hope that Apple will know when to stop growing.
@R
I don’t need more “whiz-bang surface features” (chrome) if I can secure multi-core optimization, ZFS, trimmed down OS, and power features of that ilk.
I’m planning on a Nehalem Mac Pro, to take advantage of all this stuff.
I don’t know why all the rumors sites keep getting this wrong. At WWDC, Apple showed a technology they’re calling “Grand Central DISPATCH”, not “grand central.”
Anybody have any idea when ZFS could be added to the non-server version of SL?
BTW, when Apple said “no new features” in Snow Leopard, what they meant was no new end-user features. From a developer standpoint, Snow Leopard is going to make our lives a great deal easier on many fronts.
-jcr
In case ANYONE missed it:
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a) ZFS is for servers only, this iteration
b) ZFS is NOT innovation, it is copying a better technology
I’m not dissing Apple on this – GREAT JOB, Apple. Glad to see it, sorry you couldn’t quite get it into Leopard Server. Just pointing out that we (the Mac community) have given M$ a lot of (well deserved?) flack about their lack of innovation. “It would be nice if Microsoft were driving innovation and reliability, but … they prefer to rest of their laurels.” and that Apple is not above adopting newer, arguably better, technology when possible.
Now … ZFS is really useful mainly for large-scale computing. The Enterprise beckons! Who ever said Apple wasn’t going there?
The approach that Apple is taking with Snow Leopard is right.
What good are multi-core processors if you can’t take advantage of their capability. As hard drives increase in size due to more folks storing music, photos and movies, data integrity and speed become more and more important.
Go get ’em Apple !
It may be mainly for the enterprise, but the ability to do instant point backups, total absolute data checking/correction with no loss of data after power outages, and simplified RAID to the point of it almost being invisible sure sounds appealing to this home user.
“At WWDC, Apple showed a technology they’re calling “Grand Central DISPATCH”, not “grand central.”
From apple.com:
Multicore
“’Grand Central,’ a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.”
ZFS will be huge for consumers who manage a lot of content. As a professional photographer, I have eight hard drives littering my desk – four for archiving photos, music and movies, and four to back them up. The photos are on a RAID 5 as well as backed up to separate drives because I absolutely cannot lose them. With ZFS, managing all this will become a whole lot easier. I’ll be able to buy a dumb 8-bay eSATA box and just add new drives to it as needed. Can’t wait!
ZFS would also make Time Machine backups almost instantaneous, potentially take up a lot less space, and be able to back up your Fusion or Parallels VM’s too. And handle the Aperture vaults. There are good consumer reasons to put ZFS on the desktop and not just the server. Hopefully Apple won’t wait very long before taking it from the Server to the Desktop.