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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.

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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

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