Thanks, Todd! We did a demo with our customer, and it looks like they will buy. I found out that the backup deduplication product (aka thin backups?) they plan to use has a folder hierarchy of some sort, so they won't have millions of files in a single folder. It's really a good idea that you guys are using XFS, I think (although ZFS--with deduplication hooks--would rock).

They are a Windows shop, so they will use SMB. Does the NFS daemon count affect SMB?