FreeBSD founder quits Apple to focus on Big Data

Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of the popular FreeBSD operating system and Director of Unix Technology at Apple, has stepped down from his role at the Cupertino-based firm to become CTO of iXsystems. The Silicon Valley firm specialises in high availability servers and storage systems and has close ties with the FreeBSD community.

As CTO, Hubbard will lead engineering and development at iXsystems, take the reins of open source storage platform FreeNAS and work to bring the TrueNAS Unified Storage Appliance to a wider audience by adding new capabilities, such as object storage, simpler cloud integration, and high-performance real-time data deduplication, with a view to serving the needs of emerging enterprise and consumer markets.

At Apple, Hubbard led the development of many BSD and Unix technologies at the core of Mac OS X and iOS over the last 12 years. His primary areas of focus were on modernising the Unix platform, creating better and more fundamental security technologies, increasing performance and power efficiency, and promoting the common interests and exchange of technologies between the OS community and Apple.

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With Hubbard’s knowledge and experience, iXsystems said it is poised to expand further into the enterprise storage market, increasing support for industry standards. TrueNAS Unified Storage is already used around the world supporting big data, virtualisation, and cloud computing infrastructures and, under Hubbard’s leadership, TrueNAS aims to further its position as a powerful and easy to use storage option.

Hubbard co-founded the FreeBSD project in 1993 and was a long-time executive employee of iXsystems’ corporate ancestors, BSDi and Walnut Creek CD-ROM. BSDi became iXsystems in 2001, and Walnut Creek became the FreeBSD Mall in 2002, before re-joining iXsystems in 2005.