Ah, Ben understands and did a great demonstration of thin provisioning (also read Dave’s Blog) with ZFS using sparse volumes (zvols).
HUGE.
The ability to thin provision storage is a very “enterprise” feature that one can know get from free when using ZFS+Opensolaris.
When combined with ethernet-based storage networks (iSCSI), it’s unstoppable.
Ben’s also a Joyeur now.
Welcome to the Family, Ben.