APFS in Detail: Space Efficiency and Clones
This series of posts covers APFS, Apple’s new filesystem announced at WWDC 2016. See the first post for the table of contents. Space Efficiency A modern trend in file systems has been to store data more efficiently to effectively increase the size of your device. Common approaches include compression (which, as noted above, is very very likely [...]
Read more...In: APFS, snapshots, software
APFS in Detail: Encryption, Snapshots, and Backup
This series of posts covers APFS, Apple’s new filesystem announced at WWDC 2016. See the first post for the table of contents. Encryption Encryption is clearly a core feature of APFS. This comes from diverse requirements from the various devices, for example multiple keys within file systems on the iPhone or per-user keys on laptops. I heard [...]
Read more...APFS in Detail: Overview
Apple announced a new file system that will make its way into all of its OS variants (macOS, tvOS, iOS, watchOS) in the coming years. Media coverage to this point has been mostly breathless elongations of Apple’s developer documentation. With a dearth of detail I decided to attend the presentation and Q&A with the APFS [...]
Read more...ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple completed all but the fiddliest finishing touches without help from the DTrace team. Even when they did meet with us we had no idea that they were mere [...]
Read more...Finding What’s Next
After nearly nine years at Sun and then six at Delphix I’m looking for the next technology, team, and market to dive into. I’ve had the extremely good fortune of working with three groups—the DTrace team, Fishworks at Sun, and Delphix—that featured top-tier technologists working on differentiated products, each of them a wonderful place and [...]
Read more...Big News for ZFS on Linux
Canonical announced a few weeks ago that ZFS will be included in the next release of Ubuntu Linux, on by default and fully supported. And it’s no exaggeration when Dustin Kirkland describes ZFS as “one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time.” In the words of our 47th [...]
Read more...Unikernels are unfit for production
Recently, I made the mistake of rhetorically asking if I needed to spell out why unikernels are unfit for production. The response was overwhelming: whether people feel that unikernels are wrong-headed and are looking for supporting detail or are unikernel proponents and want to know what the counter-arguments could possibly be, there is clearly a [...]
Read more...Bringing clarity to containers
At the beginning of the year, I laid down a few predictions. While I refuse on principle to engage in Stephen O’Grady-style self-flagellation, I do think it’s worth revisiting the headliner prediction, namely that 2015 is the year of the container. I said at the time that it wasn’t particularly controversial, and I don’t think [...]
Read more...Delphix Technology Scholarship for Women
Walk around almost any software development shop or university CS department and you’ll be struck by the underrepresentation of women. At least you would be were this not an expected norm of our industry. And of course much has been written about this recently hot topic in Silicon Valley. What do companies and organizations do [...]
Read more...Delphix Sync
Oracle OpenWorld is always a huge event for us at Delphix; it brings together our customers and partners like nothing else. And so it was the perfect venue to launch our new Delphix user group: Sync. In its history Delphix has learned best from our customers. As I heard Marc Benioff opine at Dropbox’s inaugural [...]
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