I haven’t been paying all that much attention to the upcoming Leopard/OS X 10.5 for a while, though I certainly like what I’ve heard about it. As I was languidly cruising one of the Apple rumor sites the other day, though, I came across this screenshot, which intruiged me, because I hadn’t heard of the Zettabyte File System, much less any support for it in OS X.

So off my fingers flew to Google, which led me to Sun, whereupon I let out an involuntary gasp of geekish delight. What was the source of my pleasure? ZFS represents wholly automated storage management. Here’s how Sun puts it (emphasis mine):

The centerpiece of this new architecture is the concept of a virtual storage pool which decouples the file system from physical storage in the same way that virtual memory abstracts the address space from physical memory, allowing for much more efficient use of storage devices… space is shared dynamically between multiple file systems from a single storage pool, and is parceled out of the pool as file systems request it. Physical storage can be added to or removed from storage pools dynamically, without interrupting services…

Maybe this is old hat to you, dear reader. It wouldn’t be the first time that the Next Big Thing I’m all excited about is actually yesterday’s news. It’s new and awesome to me, though: finally, the ability to simply throw more disk storage at a desktop-level machine instead of moving files hither and yon on external drives, or going through the copy/backup n’ restore hassle of replacing devices with ones of greater capacity. This has great implications for home DV editing (as well as disturbing implications for those users prone to generate cruft). Still. Freaking sweet.