This month ACM Queue speaks with two Sun engineers who are bringing file systems into the 21st century. Jeff Bonwick, CTO for storage at Sun, led development of the ZFS file system, which is now part of Solaris. Bonwick and his co-lead, Sun Distinguished Engineer Bill Moore, developed ZFS to address many of the problems they saw with current file systems, such as data integrity, scalability, and administration. In our discussion this month, Bonwick and Moore elaborate on these points and what makes ZFS such a big leap forward.

Also in the conversation is Pawel Jakub Dawidek, a FreeBSD developer who successfully ported ZFS to FreeBSD. Ports to other operating systems, such as Mac OS X, Linux, and NetBSD are already under way, and his experience could pave the way for even wider adoption of ZFS.