Jeff Bonwick

Jeff Bonwick invented and led development of the ZFS file system,^[1] which was used in Oracle Corporation's ZFS storage products as well as startups including Nexenta, Delphix, Joyent, and Datto, Inc.^[2][3] Bonwick is also the inventor of slab allocation,^[4][5] which is used in many operating systems including MacOS and Linux, and the LZJB compression algorithm.

Jeff Bonwick in 2010

His roles included Sun Fellow,^[6][7] Sun Storage CTO,^[8] and Oracle vice president.^[9]

History

In 2010 Bonwick co-founded a small company called DSSD with Mike Shapiro and Bill Moore, and became chief technical officer.^[10] 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.^[11] DSSD was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2014,^[12] which then became part of Dell Technologies in 2016. By the end of 2016, Bill Moore had left the company, while Bonwick remained as CTO.^[13] The DSSD product, called D5, was cancelled in March 2017.^[14]

LZJB

Bonwick invented LZJB, a lossless data compression algorithm to compress crash dumps and data in ZFS. The software is CDDL license licensed. It includes a number of improvements to the LZRW1 algorithm, a member of the Lempel–Ziv family of compression algorithms.^[15] The name LZJB is derived from its parent algorithm and its creator — Lempel Ziv Jeff Bonwick.