Does Solaris matter?

Seriously, back in the boom when I did nothing but live in SSH sessions Solaris mattered. It mattered hell of a lot. Unless you were a Telco (Usually HP-UX) or a TruBlu shop (The term I use to refer to wall to wall IBM environments, so we're talking AIX in this case) any organization above a specific size was probably a Solaris shop. Solaris 2.6/7 and Windows NT being the foundation for many companies during the dot com era.

Post crash we have Sun hyping ZFS as well as considering slapping the GPL onto OpenSolaris, and yet I still see more people throwing out Solaris than adopting it. Indeed even I have stopped replacing Solaris instances when systems are retired, I just throw the workload into a Virtual Machine or onto a physical x86 host running Windows or Linux.

As for ZFS well some folks think it's the universe in a file system/volume manager combo, and I'm sure Symantec have been taking a long hard look at VxFS and planning a ZFS counter punch, but if you're a Windows or Linux shop chances are none of that will matter and you'll just run what's native. Be it NTFS or EXT3/EXT4

Perhaps ZFS is a bit too Star Trek for it's own good? For the most part people don't usually rush to jump from well understood technology to new technology. The higher the stakes the greater the resistance to change.