I don’t recall that being the case. Bonwick had been thinking about ZFS for at least a couple of years. Matt Ahrens joined Sun (with me) in 2001. The Afara acquisition didn’t close until 2002. Niagara certainly was tantalizing but it wasn’t a primary design consideration. As I recall, AMD was head and shoulders above everything else in terms of IO capacity. Sun was never very good (during my tenure there) at coordination or holistic strategy.