Jeff Bonwick invented and led development of the
ZFS
ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an open ...
file system, which was used in
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...
's ZFS storage products as well as startups including Nexenta, Delphix,
Joyent
Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service.
On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics.
Services
Triton, Joye ...
, and Datto, Inc. Bonwick is also the inventor of
slab allocation
Slab allocation is a memory management mechanism intended for the efficient memory allocation of objects. In comparison with earlier mechanisms, it reduces fragmentation caused by allocations and deallocations.
This technique is used for retai ...
, which is used in many operating systems including
MacOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
, and the
LZJB compression algorithm.
His roles included Sun Fellow, Sun Storage CTO, and Oracle vice president.
History
In 2010 Bonwick co-founded a small company called DSSD with
Mike Shapiro and Bill Moore, and became chief technical officer. He co-invented DSSD's system hardware architecture and software. He developed DSSD's whole-system simulator, which enabled the team to explore possible hardware topologies and software algorithms. DSSD was acquired by
EMC Corporation
Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud ...
in 2014, which then became part of
Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Round Rock, Texas. It was formed as a result of the September 2016 merger of Dell and EMC Corporation (which later became Dell EMC).
Dell's products inc ...
in 2016.
By the end of 2016, Bill Moore had left the company, while Bonwick remained as CTO. The DSSD product, called D5, was cancelled in March 2017.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bonwick, Jeff
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Open source people
Free software programmers
American computer scientists
Place of birth missing (living people)
American computer programmers
Solaris people
Sun Microsystems people