c0t0d0s0.org

Take an integrated stack of hardware, solaris 10 with all its features (ZFS,dTrace,FMA ..) and some additional secret sauce and you have the recipe to fry some vendors of appliances, namely NetApps . The success of NetApps is somewhat mysterious to me ... it´s a single trick pony (although it´s able to perform this trick almost in perfection) and it owes the long success the inactivity of the big Tier-1 vendors to compete with NetApp. But what happens when a Tier1 really start to enter the market. What happens when Sun starts to put a 500pound gorilla (Solaris in conjunction with Sun R&D) into this playground? There are interesting times ahead of us.

A Sun engineer was able to build a Solaris Operating Environment which is only 60 MB (30 MB compressed image) and runs completely in RAM. For example to use it in an poor man´s thumper.
Okay, this alone makes no embedded applicance, but now take into consideration that there is an ongoing port to the Power-Architecture in progress. And take into consideration that Sun gives you an GPLed processor design to use for free. Imagine a file server applicance with a single core UltraSPARC T1. Or a home router with a single core T1 without cache and only one memory controller. Or a really kickass webserver applicance with a fully blown T1. The possiblilties are vast and endless. You only have to see and take them.