Sun Microsystems has confirmed that Apple will use Sun"s Zettabyte File System (ZFS) for the forthcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard due in October. Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at a company event in Washington DC on Wednesday that Apple will officially reveal the technology at its World Wide Developer Conference scheduled for San Francisco next week. ZFS is the world"s first 128-bit file system, supporting 18 billion times the storage capacity of current-generation 64-bit systems. A zettabyte is equal to 1,024 exabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Sun developed the technology and has released it under an open source licence. The file system is currently deployed in Sun"s Solaris operating system. ZFS promises improved data integrity compared with Apple"s current Journaled HFS+ file system.