Pigboy, OFF TOPIC RE STORAGE AND FIBRE CHANNEL,
I'm not a storage expert either but have been "all around it, or it's been all around me" for a number of years. A couple of things come to mind when reading Gilder's gloomy outlook for FC and SANs. The first is security. Banks, insurance companies, government, most everybody consider their data as their most important commodity, well, hopefully after people. I don't see all storage of critical data going out to hang on ethernets as a very secure situation. Big companies have terabytes or petabytes of high security data that they will continue to want in more traditional SANs that can't be tapped into easily at all. The second is RAS. Same problem with NASs. You won't get your five 9's with them as you will with SANs and high RAS servers. Hey, on the network, if a request gets lost, it's like, big deal, let them try it again. On dedicated SANs, no way Jose do you ever give up on an I/O request. Exaggeration but not too much.
If you want to read from some real experts, check out EMC's home page. They talk about both SANs and NASs, are into both, are definitely not giving up on the former. Also, there is a storage expert on the SI EMC thread you could ask. If you can't tell who it is, PM me.
Tony
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