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Veritas was definitely better than the alternative. I was a dba at the time and it was a godsend.

I still can't believe a top-tier UNIX vendor required an expensive 3rd party software to have halfway decent file-system. Or in the case of HP-UX, partitioning.

I get that Veritas also did logical volume, raid and so on and that was a guenuine value added at the time. But so many box I saw had veritas so they could partition and get a file system that was OK with 36GB+ monster SCSI disks.

From having to use it on solaris, it was more the flexibility of resizing and changing the layout without downtime that was useful.

When you have a 100k+ machine it makes more sense, when you can just rebuild a new instance it makes less sense. I do NOT miss using it, but it was nice for its niche.

I ran DEC Alpha servers at the same time, and Tru64 (aka OSF/1 aka DEC UNIX) shipped with AdvFS. It has a lot of the same features as ZFS (volume management combined with the FS, so you could add/remove drives, and grow/shrink capacity w/o downtime). I remember my Sun admin friends being incredulous as I shuffled disk space on a live server. It is kind of a shame HP killed it.

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