No company left the FibreAlliance. This was a mis-interpretation of only one reporter. Note that no other press reported the same story.
Whether or not the story is true, the "only one press reported it" line is hardly a defense. Remember Woodward and Bernstein?
Finally, I have seen lots of presentations by analysts about NAS and SAN and what is stated below is really focused on the point they make of where do NAS and SAN meet. If you need to have file sharing, then use NAS but even the NAS server will need the benefits of SAN (connectivity, distance, scaleability, etc). So the analysts position NAS as using SAN on their backend.
This was clearly the direction 2 years ago, and if it wasn't for SAN vendor fud more customers would realize this.
There are still, and will continue to be, a large installed set of application that do not use NAS and they will use SAN directly.
There will continue to be a far larger installed set of applications that use only NAS and not SAN. In fact, very few applications use *only* SAN directly, because that would largely be useless; the data still has to get to the end-user to be useful, even if it's through a secondary application, and that user is very likely to be connected over a network.
Bruce