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It still stands for Zettabyte File System. That has never changed.


According to Jeff Bonwick, one of ZFS's lead developers, it did change. He discussed this point in detail (https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/you_say_zeta_i_...), however I'll just quote the last couple of paragraphs for brevity:

"But zettabyte wasn't perfect, actually. We (we were a team by now) found that when you call it the zettabyte filesystem, you have to explain what a zettabyte is, and by then the elevator has reached the top floor and all people know is that you're doing large capacity. Which is true, but it's not the main point.

"So we finally decided to unpimp the name back to ZFS, which doesn't stand for anything. It's just a pseudo-acronym that vaguely suggests a way to store files that gets you a lot of points in Scrabble."


I stand corrected.




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