When Sun Microsystems introduced a file system for addressing one billion terabytes of storage to its Solaris operating system, detractors described it as a feature no one would use. However, Sun's prediction that others would soon follow has proven correct.

The latest version of Hewlett Packard's more than 20-year-old proprietary Unix operating system, HP-UX 11i v3, has joined Solaris 10 in betting its longevity on the rapidly growing storage environments in the 21st century.