Just my two pence worth on SANs and ADSM.

When the SAN industry gets its act together properly and we have IP over
FC-AL then who needs to customise all that code and deal with a whole new
raft of bugs?

Next thought. We'll all move to 100mbyte/sec SANs over fibre and do all our
storage over these loops (it'll all be on switches though). We'll have
switch routers and then networks teams concerned with router traffic.

Next somebodies I/O performance on their critical system will suffer because
of all the backup traffic we're generating on the SAN.

Then we'll be allocated our own dedicated SANs for backup traffic.....hmm
sounds familiar...yes our dedicated backup LANs which run IP already,
gigabit ethernet is there now.

Sure we'll then get intelligent devices on the SAN, 'disk back thyself up' -
when the disk understands the filesystem -- ah thats where we need a SAN
Filesystem format that all products understand - more code changes for a new
filesystem format. (subtly avoiding the subject of NDMP and NetApp filers
which have all this already too). Now lets take a look at which vendor is
out there championing their filesystem as the new SAN standard filesystem.
Its that young upstart Veritas again - if VxFS gets out there then all the
proprietary add-ons that Veritas have will become must haves (block-level
incrementals, flashbackup....)

IBM - in terms of strategy and direction you need to be up there with
this...or are you and its just that Veritas is real good at marketing? Time
for some pointed questions at the next briefing session.

My thoughts only.
Alan