For me it means a truly scalable, high performance file network on par and separate from session taffic networks. Just a lust I guess.
You can have that today -- just buy a Gigabit Ethernet switch and run only NFS and CIFS over it! Gigabit Ethernet runs at 100 MB/sec just like fibre channel does. Gigabit Ethernet is based on essentially the same high-speed switching fabric ASIC technology that fibre channel is.
Many of our high end customers do build separate machine room networks that the dedicate to high performance traffic between a farm of compute servers and a farm of NetApp filers.
It would help me think more about possible solutions if you could describe more about the problem you are trying to solve. If the problem is that file server traffic slows down other parts of your TCP/IP network, then using dedicated Gigabit switches is a great solution.
If you are trying to solve some other problems, then maybe it's not so good.
To me, SAN technology is ideally suited for things like attaching to lots and lots of disks, sharing tapes between multiple systems, so those are the benefits that we are hoping to achieve in our OEM relationship with Brocade.
Dave