For those of you who haven’t heard – Apple’s next iteration of the Mac OS X operating system (10.6) will be code-named “Snow Leopard.” Most users won’t notice a whole lot that will change from an aesthetic point of view in this release. Apple says most changes are “under the hood.” There you go again, being modest, Apple.

While it is accurate to say the changes are mostly “under the hood,” it’s quite an understatement. Apple recently announced that the ZFS file system will be incorporated into Snow Leopard. ZFS is a super-sweet file system that takes advantage of multi-core processing technologies, is open-source, and developed by the engineers at Sun. It’s ridiculously redundant, storing checksums of every block of your data in a parent block, and protects against data corruption in every part of the data stream path.

Not only that, but ZFS in Snow Leopard will make RAID and back-ups even more smooth and less error-prone. ZFS will also make managing your disks in terms of volumes a thing of the past. Since ZFS is both a file system and volume / data integrity management system, you only have a pool of storage blocks to worry about. Add another disk? Your pool just got bigger.

Aside from the astoundingly fast, simple, and reliable ZFS file system, Snow Leopard has one other announced feature that has Microsoft Execs opening up their Prozac and Jack Daniels bottles: “unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named “Grand Central,” making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs,” according to Apple’s Press Release.

Grand Central is going to change the race. Apple has been steadily gaining momentum, going from a company that Microsoft just sort of joked around about to one of which they are now deathly afraid. Now with Bill Gates retiring, this may be the death knell calling for Microsoft.

Grand Central may also be bundled with compiler technologies from Cray Computing, the supercomputer masterminds, that may allow developers to simply and easily take huge advantage of the multi-core processors available in today’s Macs.

By comparison, the NTFS file system is 20+ year-old technology Microsoft borrowed from DEC, and the WinFS system that was originally slated for Windows Vista got canned because they couldn’t work it out in time. Vista is still a workhorse if configured correctly, but Snow Leopard is set to leave it in the dust if Microsoft can’t figure out how to fully and efficiently utilize multi-core processors by the time Windows 7 is out.

-The Raging Tech