And herein lies the main clue. It seems Solaris, like FreeBSD, has the same 
lack-of-backup-options for zfs (dump doesn't work), unless you have a secondary 
server with at least the same amount of diskspace, running UFS, and willing to 
cache zfs sends on that ufs for writing those to the tape. While I've seen 
severe degradation of performance with FreeBSD UFS2 on large (as in the size of 
my storage zpool) ufs'es, I have no reason to suspect that Solaris has the same 
problem. So, the next question is split into several alternatives (assuming 
that Solaris UFS still has the capability of splitting dumps over more-than-one 
tape?):

-Can I get OpenSolaris to install to UFS? If so, how?
-Is there a way to get the yge OpenSolaris package (yukon gigabit ethernet 
that's actually compatible with dladm, as opposed to the one from Marvell) 
installed on plain vanilla Solaris 10u8, since QFS-SAM isn't ported to 
OpenSolaris (yet)? (I've got another suitable box to handle the iSCSI/NFS/SMB 
jobs that can use the QFS backend, since this box has nowhere near the required 
diskspace by itself).
-If I need to dance the 
compile-gnu-software-from-sources-spread-over-half-the-internet to make, and 
restore, backups: is there any real benefit (for me) choosing (Open)Solaris 
over FreeBSD, considering that I know my way around FreeBSD well enough to be 
able to keep my calm in a restore situation (And FreeBSD gives me sufficient 
performance for my needs).
-Are there any planes in motion to make zfs send/recv capable of dumping to 
removable media in a sensible fashion (a simple "device full, press enter to 
continue on next device" would suffice)?

Backing up to disks really isn't an option here, and buying more software now 
isn't really a good option either, since all those expenses are coming out of 
my personal pocket.

//Svein
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