Solaris 8 available for download

We currently have zfs in production for our app servers zones (hundreds of users) and it works great, we are currently testing it with a development oracle 10 DB and it till now (4 months) we had no problems. Please check http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_for_Databases

expecially: "match the ZFS recordsize to the Oracle db_block_size"

I feel like we answer variants of this question often on Server Fault.

You can do all of this with NexentaStor's commercial offering, using either asynchronous replication (ZFS Send/Receive over ssh/netcat or rsync) or synchronous replication (with another commercial plugin).

There are vendors who package and certify these setups with custom hardware. The easiest example is the Pogo Linux Storage Director series.

I personally own a Sun x4540 that used to run OpenSolaris, but is now running Nexenta Enterprise. The Sun hardware is a little sketchy after only two years though, and I've seen found more value in building my own. I'm currently using HP hardware to build single storage nodes, but I can expand to external storage with LSI enclosures. People have documented SuperMicro-based solutions as well. In the HP systems, I'm replacing the Smart Array controllers with LSI 6GB SAS controllers; 9211-8i for internal use, and 9200 for external. You would need to do something similar in the Dell case.