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At a meta level, correct, none of this is new. The overall concepts are not new. UFS has snapshots right now, for example. EMC has had clones for a while. Veritas can import and export volumes.

But nothing to the level of integration that ZFS provides, or the, literally, "unlimited" capabilities (snapshots, clones, filesystems, files, raids, volumes, etc. etc. all have a "hard limit" of 128-bits. As has been said, "The oceans will boil first.").

Clones on the EMCs were at the block level, not the file system level, and not anywhere close to as dynamic as what ZFS offers. Managing a 100 disk array is a PAIN IN THE NECK. Even worse, RECONFIGURING such an array is even worse.

ZFS took all of those great ideas, took out the silly limits, rethought the whole problem, and combined the concept of File System and Volume Manager under one integrated whole. And they took great pains to keep it fast, keep it bullet proof, and bring it to the masses.

I can run ZFS on an Ancient SPARC Ultra 10, using dime store hard drives that DON'T EVEN MATCH. I can mount those drives, write data, stripe data, snapshot data, all that wonderful stuff. When I get a shiny new AMD box, I export them off my Ultra, yank 'em out, plug 'em in, import them on my AMD, and I'm back up and running. No tapes, no backups, no rewriting my 10 zillion emails, no need for NFS.

For free.

With source code.

Components aren't new. But the whole thing is new. And it's amazing. I can hardly wait for folks to port this to Linux and BSD. I wish someone would port it to Windows.

So, yea, it's Amazing. They Did It, they seem to have Done It Right, and they Did Everything.