Keeping data safe is critical work, and seldom seen. A file system is handed everything people keep, and it has to stay right through crashes, failing disks and writes cut short. One of the principles ZFS was designed on, in Bill Moore’s words: never, ever trust the underlying hardware.1

This museum pays homage to that piece of engineering, and to the people who built it. Jeff Bonwick led the development of ZFS, with Bill Moore as co-lead;1 Matt Ahrens was one of its two original authors.2 The work began in 2001 with two engineers at Sun Microsystems3 and was integrated into Solaris on 31 October 2005,4 a step Bonwick summed up as 584 files, 92,000 lines of change, 56 patents, 5 years.4 On 17 November he wrote: I’m incredibly proud of the ZFS team, and deeply grateful: no one person can do something on this scale.5

It pays homage, too, to the engineering at Sun in those years, where engineers published how their systems worked: the slab allocator, presented by Jeff Bonwick at USENIX in 1994;6 DTrace, by Bryan Cantrill, Michael Shapiro and Adam Leventhal, in 2004;7 and the source of ZFS itself, released under the CDDL as part of OpenSolaris.3

And to those who carry it on: OpenZFS, announced in 20132 and founded by members of the Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and illumos communities.2 The release this museum reads lists more than 700 people in its AUTHORS file.