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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I don't really have any comments about the insider trading (other than whyyyyyy?) but I'll never forget Andy driving up in a ferarri at the old SUN executive briefing center (now part of the Facebook's HQ) in 2007 and giving us a presentation on the Sun filesystem hardware they had just released (Sun Fire) and he was really, really keen on telling us just how many power you could stuff into a single rack (like, kilowatts power, as well as CPU heft).

He was absolutely thrilled to geek out on the speeds and feeds and we also gave the ZFS author Mike Shapiro a bunch of crap about ZFS merging the logically distinct layers of storage (volume and FS management) while also strongly suspecting that ZFS's model would end up replacing Veritas or whatever it was people used in those days.

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Ha! I worked on that hardware, or at least, on the software in the service processor (aka, ILOM) in that hardware. I transferred out of the Linux group at Sun (which was being disbanded) and joined the group formally known as Kealia, still in its original office space on Deer Creek Rd in Palo Alto.

Context here: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2665260/sun-buys-server-co...

> ZFS merging the logically distinct layers of storage (volume and FS management)

This really weirded me out at first, but now feels so right.

Once you use ZFS it is hard to go back to anything else because of this.

Everytime I log into my esxi host I wish the storage used zfs. I know proxmox does and I'll probably head that way eventually.

I use Proxmox at home because it has ZFS and built in backups. That was enough of a selling point for me.

ESXi and VSphere not having backups built in feels like classic "create the problem, sell the solution" to me.

PCI passthrough just works on esxi, couple of clicks done. Seems a little more involved in proxmox.

You are correct.

Linux will try to grab and use every piece of hardware you have installed, so you have to whitelist/ignore things

I didn't find it too bad, but I haven't passed hardware to a VM in a number of years

Back in the day (mid 1990's IIRC), I read one of the NetApp whitepapers on their WAFL (write anywhere file layout), and that's what sold me on merging the storage layers. The Motorola group I was at was transitioning from Auxpex to NetApp around that time.

At the time of the ZFS presentation we were trying hard to move off NetApps- we had never-ending problems with WAFL (mainly caused by deleting 5TB from a nearly-full file system combined with snapshots). ZFS and Sun Fire were fairly early in their life cycles at that point so it wasn't "mature" enough for our enterprise use cases.

I still don't like the idea of combinging volume management with filesystem, but it's clear that it's worked well for many people over the past 15 years

Saw Andy at one conf, I confirm he was wayy into minutiae. Geekiest presentation technical in a supposedly not-too-technical panel. But, not related to the insider trading.

I know this is off-topic but may I ask what type of Ferrari was it? 360 spider? That's quite the scene you describe, imagine all the people who felt inspired/disgusted by the car. It's straight out of a movie.

TBH I can't recall. I tried to find some references but only to the silver Porsche 944.

Or out of Silicon Valley (the series).

> (other than whyyyyyy?

Really? Money, and the thought they wouldn't get caught.

Already has plenty of money I assume, no one ever thinks they're going to get caught. I don't know him but from the people in this thread that do, it sounds like he should have known better.

> Already has plenty of money I assume,

That's beside the point. What's one thing almost all people with more money than they need, want? more.

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