Over at OSDev, 'chase' is converting from Solaris x86 to Linux. His primary reason is the work involved in installing new packages in Solaris and maintaining those packages.

Here's an interesting quote:

The other thing is ext3 seems to handle power failures a little better than UFS w/logging. As cool as ZFS is it's not bootable yet. Even though the data center has power generators I've still lost power a couple of times.

Leaving aside the fact that ZFS is currently bootable in Nevada build 62, let's look at that comparison: ext3 > UFS+logging. Let's assume for the sake of argument that's correct. Given that ZFS > ext3, and that, even though S10 needs a UFS partition to boot from, the rest of the disk and any other disks can be put into a ZFS pool, this is not a valid reason for choosing ext3.

Here are some comparisons to consider: Losing power = data corruption; ext3 = data corruption; UFS+logging = data corruption. All three are silent. All three result in degradation over time. All three cause servers to fail with no warning.

ZFS at least gives you warning, even if it can't repair the damage.

The bottom line is that Solaris is hard to administer (yeah, it's a fair cop), so server data is just going to have to suffer. Hopefully some day Solaris will be as easy as redhat, or debian, or ubuntu, or <insert name of distro here>. Some day. Meanwhile, I'll choose data integrity over ease of administration.