Z File System or also known as ZFS was created by Matthew Ahrens and Jeff Bonwick in 2001 to be the next generation file system for Sun Microsystem's Solaris. In 2008 ZFS was ported to FreeBSD which at the same year a ZFS ported project for Linux is also started the project name was ZFS on Linux.
However since ZFS is under the Common Development and Distribution License it can't be included directly to Linux Kernel. To solve this many Linux distributions make an offer to install ZFS from their package manager.