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SUN MICROSYSTEMS has much to answer for. In the early 1980s, the company wrote the most popular Unix operating system. It played a large part in creating TCP/IP, the technology that allowed the internet to blossom.

It created and gave away for free the NFS (network file system), then it built networking into every computer it sold. Between that time and now, the firm also created the Java programming language that today dominates enterprise software development.

Well, Sun is at it again.

It is shaking up the operating system world with its new Solaris 10, but it wants to do more. It wants to update the file systems that support the world's networks.

Sun's ambitious plan is called ZFS  (zettabyte file system),  which  is designed to handle huge amounts of data safely. Sun claims, for example, that 80 per cent of administrative overhead for storage will be eliminated.

Traditional file systems use a separate volume manager to handle disk drives. It can be a laborious task simply to add or remove a single disk. ZFS, on the other hand, uses virtual storage pools, which makes it far easier to add or delete file systems.

Doing away with cumbersome partitions that have to be 'mounted' before they would appear to the system, its common storage pool gives every file system instant access to the pool.

Data will also be protected by 64-bit checksums that should result in far safer data transfers. These features should alleviate much  of the work now done by administrators.

As a 128-bit file system, ZFS has 16 billion times the capacity of previous systems.

Bryan Cantrill,  a software engineer who has made a name for himself through Dynamic Tracing (a revolutionary debugging technology built into Solaris 10), said there may never again be an opportunity to fix some of the problems older file systems have created.

'With ZFS, the whole thing was rewritten from the ground up. I don't think anything like this will ever be possible again,' he said. The problem is enormous.

'Storing data is a mess. It is hard to add to or shrink the amount easily.'

Size, however, is not all that matters. Mr Cantrill said a great deal has been done to make things more efficient and safer. There is dynamic load balancing, logging and flexible volume management.

The last mentioned is aimed at simplifying the overall system itself. Adding mirrored file systems for three users can now be done in five steps and takes only 10 seconds. In previous systems, this would have meant 28 steps and at least 40 minutes.

With its new operating system, code-named Longhorn, Microsoft will be trying to change its own desktop-dominating system to accommodate a lot more. Some of the details about Longhorn are shrouded in mystery, mainly because of the constant delays. It is now expected in 2006, if it is not delayed even further.

Sun  believes  its innovation will not only drive its own business but will differentiate itself from its competitors. Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, said at the end of last year, when Sun officially launched Solaris 10, that the issues were not just about IT.

'Innovation is not just about technology. It is about culture. It is about people agreeing to do things differently,' he said.

Few would deny that Sun has had a tremendous impact on the technology we use today. However, the big question is whether we are still in a position to change? In the early days it was easy, but today we have huge amounts of investment tied to legacy systems, and changing them will not be  easy, although we may have to do so to accommodate all the data we have yet to create.



Spirit of innovation sees Sun recreate network file systems