[mechanicalpulse]

> ZFS includes some impressive features long found in enterprise arrays, including snapshots, mirroring, replication, RAID, and data protection.

This is why NetApp sued Sun in 2007, claiming patent infringement.

I worked in a data center that stored medical records around that time. We were moving off of a StorageTek PowderHorn 9310 (that thing was mesmerizing) to some multi-cabinet EMC spinning disk array. You couldn't get access to that thing without hooking up a FC HBA to the SAN. Fast-forward a few years and I found myself in a similar job at a much smaller e-commerce firm. We had some old finicky NetApp filers we ended up getting rid of in favor of Sun Storage 7000 storage appliances running ZFS. Both of them supported replication, but the Sun Storage appliances were far better.

Yeah, SAN and NAS are two different things, but there's a lot of money, a lot of shared technology, and a lot of similar use cases that have driven convergence over the last decade or two.