Sun's storage team would work really well either as an autonomous unit within Oracle or a seperate company (unfortunately the last is unlikely unless the staff themselves do a 'JRuby').
Solaris is doing poorly as a general purpose Unix OS to sell Sun support / hardware for, but as an embedded hardware/software appliance Sun kit is both better and cheaper than its counterparts, and they have some extremely talented engineers (though they've bled 27% of their staff since last year).
a seperate company
One word: 3Par.
(Longer version: 3Par was founded by ex-Sun types who wanted to make storage appliances based on Solaris. Sun responded by charging them outrageous licensing fees. They went with Linux and now their business is doing just fine...)
Re:ZFS Deduplication
by bensummers on Monday November 02, 2009 @10:54AM
(#916993)
Now Solaris is open source as OpenSolaris, it's possible for someone other than Sun to build a storage appliance without having to worry about license fees.
As an example, here's some people doing it right now: http://www.nexenta.com/
Shame ZFS has a slightly indeterminate future.