Sequencing changes

Art,

Having come from consulting (now with PM at Symantec) I am very familiar with the line "Well, how soon can we have all this up and running?" :o)  What you are going to want to ask them flat out is what their preference is relative to Storage Management.  Ideally they will say we want to go with the full CFSHA stack and the issue is moot.  If they are looking to be convinced of one v.s. the other (i.e. SF vs. ZFS) then you will have to engage with your technical team to explain to them the Apples to Oranges comparison of the two and why SFHA is a much better option. 

High level, ZFS is a specific function storage management tool that is exclusive to the Solaris platform. It's published performace characteristics can be brought into question as ZFS takes caching to entirely new level.  In many instances commits from the file system are prematurely aknowledged and aren't actually applied to disk for an extended period. This can in result in data corruption if a system where to reboot or crash during this window. ZFS is (IMHO) designed as an enabler for the Oracle/SUN jbod arrrays and not relevant for enterprise class storage.

CFSHA is a complete solution offering features such as database accelerators,a journaling cluster file system that can outperform ZFS up to 4X for OLTP databases, cross platform data migration, Dynamic Multipathing with the largest HW compatibility list in the industry, built in Applications clustering agents, instantaneous failure detection along with a myriad of other value points.

Hope this helps,

Joe D