Boring

How boring is it to have SSDs only as a disk replacement?

Come on, even Sun does it better.

Apparently

There's only Sun that can actually do anything different at the moment, but it looks like Netapp are already chasing the same ideas. If you don't own the filesyem as SUN and Netapp do, then to do something other than SSD as a disk requires much more time and engineering effort.

Theres' a thing called time to market and in theory the NAS appliance vendors should have an advantage (although wasted by Netapp) in that they own and develop their own proprietry filesystems. The downside is that if you want to take advantage you must buy into this filesysetem for any and all use cases.

The reality of SSD is that we won't see immediate widespread adoption, but from a vendor / reseller perspective you can tick the box and get through to the next round. Knowing full well the customer will never actually order SSD give the current economic climate and EFD prices.

BTW the SVSP does a bit more than a Vfiler, since you can seamlessly import, and move data between existing arrays and a virtual SVSP pool, which in turn may span many dissimilar arrays. With the former you must format the whole shebang with WAFL before you see any benefits.