Solaris is not dead, at least not yet, which is a good thing Solaris 10 included ZFS. What is ZFS you ask, well its a filesystem and logical volume manager in one. ZFS filesystems are built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools. A zpool is constructed of virtual devices(vdevs), which are themselves constructed of block devices: files, hard drives or partitions, or entire drives, with the last being the recommended usage.