Why wouldn't I just use ZFS on a whitebox, and avoid paying $60,000 for 7TB? Sheesh, that feels like highway robbery... someone ought to send NetApp a clue.

Go ahead and grab you 7T of disk, some whitebox, put Opensolaris or regular Solaris or BSD, or whatever on it, install your HBAs and NIC cards, drivers, firmware, ZFS itself, etc. Now make your pools, install Samba, bind it to the AD domain, install your ISCSI initiator package, configure and export your LUNs, and go ahead and drop that sucker on the SAN. That was easy, right?

With all the money we saved already, we can buy a spares kit to keep on-site. Extra drives, NICs, HBAs, and memory. No pesky extra expensive 24/7 support contract needed!! More money for us to save - yay!

Now lets migrate your Exchange back-end over to ZFS. All those snapshots will be awesome for Exchange! We'll also drop our Oracle database and raw partitions on there, as well as export our user home directories, and set up some remote replication for the office in back in Jersey. Robocopy should carry over all those ACLs from CIFS to ZFS no sweat!

Of course we can plug all this into your Symantec Netbackup server, because it speaks ZFS as well, and should have no problem backing all that up, right? NDMP ZFS VTL FTW!!!

Wow and now that your shiny new home-brew ZFS server is installed and running, think of ALL that money you saved the company! You know, they'll probably go ahead and cut you a check for half of that, because, I mean since you built it, and you're supporting it, you deserve a little extra coin right?

Not that anything will ever go wrong with your filer, but they'll probably even throw down for one of those new Blackberry 9000s for you as well, you know, just in case they need to get ahold of you.

Have fun Brent - your new career as corporate home-brew ZFS file server guy is off to an amazing start!