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Comment by failwhaleshark | Hacker News Reader

You clearly haven't been doing enough or in various-enough industries "for awhile." I guess you missed massive Solaris shops in academia, enterprise, military, and government. Sun OS (UNIX) before '92 and then to Solaris on-top from about '94 to '13 as gear lifecycled out.

The classic use of ZFS was on the Kealia / Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" box. 96 TB in 4U in '06. It was a beast and worthy to throw rocks at NetApps.

Anytime someone insecurely touts "I've been doing X for Y years," I know they've reached peak complacency rather than continual learning and mastery.

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I used SunOS from 1992 and Solaris up to around 2004.

I'm in the semiconductor industry and we used to have thousands of SPARCstations and SPARC servers for larger jobs. All of the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools ran on Unix / X11. Around 2002 the vendors started porting some of the tools to Linux / x86. The machines were faster AND cheaper.

By 2003 the only jobs run on the Suns were processes that required >4GB RAM. When AMD released their 64-bit x86 Athlon CPUs we bought some of the first ones. After that the Suns just faded away.

In the 1990's all of our file servers were from Auspex. We have been using NetApp fileservers for about the last 20 years. Other than a few scratch drives I don't think we ever used Solaris as a file server.

An energy-sector engineering shop had SPARCstation 2's and 4's used for running nuclear reactor Fortran compilations and simulations. The software ran on any UNIX (SCO, HP-UX, BSD, SunOS/Solaris, SGI, AIX) and I helped port it to Windows about 1997. Oddly enough, Windows of that era had extremely inefficient virtual memory swap strategies.

The university I worked at had a large Solaris deployment for internal IT systems for the CS department. They kept it for many years because it worked, it was a known quantity, and was reliable. They could've changed it over to commodity boxes running Linux or FreeBSD sooner, but that would've been a major headache for downtime, costs, and staff processes.

A friend-of-a-friend ran an extremely large deployment of Solaris boxes for batch jobs of a military data processing facility.

The scariest SunOS feature was metadisks: striped drive volumes to expand storage.

I worked in a Solaris shop from 1999-2000.

I'm not insecure, and I'm not mad at ZFS. I'm just pointing out that it showed up when Sun was already circling the drain.

Seamicro managed to pack 2000 cores into 10U. Cool. I've never seen of those, either.

Yeah, 1-2 years, you must've missed it then. Regardless of the sustainability of corporate strategy, the Solaris kernel team pushed out a solid fs and David and Andy capitalized on it. ZFS is technically great, but like the awesome software no one knows about, tying it to Solaris hardware was a mistake. They should've spun ZFS off as freemium open source (against the wishes of the Solaris team./?) almost like what FreeNAS is now.

I think you're reacting to me saying "I've never seen ZFS in the wild" as "I've never seen a Solaris box in the wild." It sounds like we can agree that "explode" doesn't really cover the story of ZFS adoption.

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