saying smartos gives you persistent storage is like saying docker gives you persistent storage because you can use
docker run .... -v /storage:/storage myapp
That's not what people are talking about. If you run a container on smartos and the physical machine it is running on blows up, what happens to your persistent storage?
technically it still persists, just in the form of hawking radiation instead of bits & bytes. Some people think this is what makes amazon glacier so cheap.