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Almost 8 years ago to the day I joined Sun, one of the first things I did when I joined was try out Solaris x86. At the time I was a big Linux fan and spent an inordinate amount of time messing around trying to get things working reasonably well on my trusty but battle weary Dell laptop. Eating my own dog-food seemed reasonable. I remember playing for at least half a day but made very little progress.
It never really dawned on me to try installing Solaris on an x86 machine until today; just over 8 years later. In those 8 years - I'd say I've mostly been using Linux (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu), Windows and most recently Mac OS/X. A post on an internal mailing list caught my eye and I thought I'd give the new OpenSolaris Developer Preview a spin. The OpenSolaris folks have sensibly produced a live CD which gives you the option of testing the water without committing hard disk space. I (very ) quickly downloaded the ISO, burned it and booted. Logged in as root, ignored the license agreement, saw the ethernet port bounce and get an IP; now I'm blogging (via Firefox which is included in the LiveCD) - all in all a very slick install (and the PC is by no means standard). It seems nearly everything works except sound (but you generally learn to accept these things).
OK, so why bother ? Well - I'm really interested in storage - I have the storage requirements of a small enterprise (video, pictures, tunes, etc) and have been pondering what to do about the growing problem. Today's (interim) solution is to keep buying bigger disks and recycling the old ones for portable backups (which I keep in the firesafe). What I'm thinking of doing is putting together a cheap Solaris X86 machine and use ZFS to conslidate and virtualize the various disks I have lying around. This would give me live access to everything; and provide me with some additional reliability.
Of course - it would be great if somone would save me the bother - ie. produce a cheap storage appliance based on Solaris x86 and ZFS which I can continually expand with cheapo disks as I need to. I can't imagine there's not a business opportunity there somewhere - people are willing to throw down a grand on a digital camera - and give no thought about the longevity of the stream of valuable bits it spews out.
