It turns out the crew that works on Solaris Volume Manager names their projects after single-malt Scotches.

But the bigger news is that the Bunnahabhain project, part of Nevada build 37, does not require dnums for metadevices and hspnums for hot spare pools.

Prior to this change, metadevice logical interfaces assumed the form /dev/[r]dsk/dnn. An admin could allocate any number that wasn't already taken. To keep these assignments straight, Sun once suggested a convention for numbering, such as using multiples of 10 (d10, d20, d30) for mirrors.

In my experience, these weren't widely adopted. I've had students ask about writing descriptive names as symbolic links to the dnum. This seemed to me too fragile to recommend, and I never seriously experimented with it.