Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle's strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I'm very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.
UPDATE: No ZFS Support for Replication Manager in the near future
Using storage level snapshots can be used to run backups without directly requiring resources from the original host.
EMC Replication Manager coordinates the creation of application consistent snapshots across all the hosts in your network. It handles scheduling creation/expiration of snapshots, mounting and unmounting from backup servers, etc. from a single console.
Although it is not tightly integrated into EMC Networker like the similar Networker PowerSnap module, it can be used to start a backup process after taking a new snapshot and it has the capability to manage snapshots unrelated to backups from a GUI.
While the data sheet claims support for Solaris, there are several caveats which I have run into.
I've been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years.
I'll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me that even an older SPARC processor was more powerful than a newer Intel Pentium processor. I didn't really believe him. In time, I convinced them to get rid of most of their SPARC/Solaris in favor of the hip, free, and cheap Intel/Linux combination.
Now I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. I realize that SunOS 4.x probably still has features which I don't know how to use properly. When I look at Solaris 10, ZFS, Zones, LDOMS, DTrace, etc. I not really sure you could pay me to work with Linux (that would be soo depressing). That isn't even mentioning the SPARC hardware it runs on- Can any Intel server compare to a T5140???