The confusion to me, is that they state they have not been able to get the hardware to boot.

As of now, only the OpenSolaris "betas" allow you to boot from a ZFS volume - all the "officially blessed" Solaris releases still require the older UFS filesystem as a boot volume.

Were they running OpenSolaris instead of Solaris?

If I recall correctly, yes, they've only been using OpenSolaris over Solaris.

I thought the point of ZFS was to avoid corruption?

That's right, and this sucks since I have data in my lifetime StrongSpace account.