I remember when I worked in a company that was a netapp shop, and in 2007, they sent one of the ZFS developers and andy bechtolsheim to sell us thumper and ZFS. The developer and I had a spirited discussion of the relative merits of having volume management built into the filesystem.

At the time I advised my company to skip the storage servers (which were overdesigned IMHO, but were unquestionably stout hardware) but that ZFS was an interesting filesystem to explore.

Hah! That was the system my small university IT department bought to act as a storage server. Actually they bought 2, with one to act as a backup.

Unfortunately for them, no one knew how to administrate Solaris, so they... installed Windows. No idea if they actually succeeded in doing anything useful with the systems.

Bought three with 1TB drives and ZFS. Wasn’t cheap.

Hardware was great, but no linux/zfs support meant we didn’t stick with it.

A couple of years later we had standardised on supermicros with a similar density and ran linux on them.

Sun lost a fair amount of money from us (7 figures) by choosing not to embrace linux.

IIRC the company I was at at the time had a set of thumpers for something. Maybe a SAN?

They were incredibly cool for the time.