Sun’s ZFS Creator to Quit Oracle and Join Startup

In a blog post, Bonwick said he will leave Oracle as of September 30 to begin anew at a startup that is currently in stealth mode. He shed no more light than that on the subject.

Identified An Opportunity

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems and adopted as part of the Solaris operating system. It was announced in September, 2004, and the source code for ZFS was integrated into the main trunk of Solaris development in October, 2005. The name originally stood for Zettabyte File System, though it has long been known simply as ZFS.

In his post, Bonwick said: “I have always enjoyed my work, and still do – everything from MTS-2, to Sun Fellow, to Oracle VP. I love the people I work with and the technology we’ve created together, which is why I’ve been doing it for so long. But I have always wanted to try doing a startup and recently identified an opportunity that I just can’t resist.”

Since announcing its plans to acquire Sun in April, 2009, and then closing the deal in January, Oracle has witnessed the departure of some notable engineering talent, including James Gosling, Tim Bray, and DTrace co-creators Adam Leventhal and Bryan Cantrill.

Yet Bonwick’s tale does not include any dissatisfaction with the Oracle Way, which some other former Sun engineers have mentioned as a factor in their decision to leave the company. Indeed, in an interview with eWEEK, Java creator James Gosling said a key part of his decision to leave Oracle was that his decision-making power over Java had been severely restricted.

However, Bonwick, a former CTO for storage at Sun and known as the father of ZFS, said Oracle stands to take the technology further in the market.

In a portion of his post aimed at the ZFS team, Bonwick said: “This team will always have a special place in my heart. Being part of the Solaris team means doing the Right Thing, innovating, changing the rules and being thought leaders – creating the ideas that everyone else wants to copy. Add to that Oracle’s unmatched market reach and ability to execute, and you have a combination that I believe will succeed in ways we couldn’t have imagined two years ago. I hope that Solaris and ZFS Storage are wildly successful, and that you have fun making it happen.”

Bonwick also thanked the overall ZFS community: “Thank you for being behind us from Day One,” he said. “After a decade in the making, ZFS is now an adult. Of course, there’s always more to do and, from this point forward, I look forward to watching you all do it. There is a great quote whose origin I have never found: ‘Your ideas will go further if you don’t insist on going with them.’ That has proven correct many times in my life and I am confident that it will prove true again.”