NetApp do not have a solution for SAN and I think that NetApp should re-think their direction.

NetApp isn't in the SAN business. Whether they should be is an interesting question to discuss, but it's certainly not the foregone conclusion you paint.

I think that NetApps products are great but I am disappointed that they don't plan for future competitive products.

Personally, I think NetApp remains on track to continue to offer competitive products for some time. As best I can see, the only threat that could really put a hurting on 'em would be if someone came out with a cheap PCI board that took standard SDRAM modules and provided fast-n-cheap battery-backed storage, then started working on the device drivers to get it used properly with a good filesystem. Something like Reiserfs has a lot of the performance features people like in WAFL. If it knew intimately about a solid RAID implementation and battery-backed cache, about the only other thing to add would be snapshots. Oh, and getting CIFS compatibility right isn't a whole lot of fun. I'd guess NetApp has a few years play in 'em yet; they really do have a large amount of tough engineering to try to reproduce. The Open Source swarms may be chasing them. Will they be caught? It'll be fun to see.

Some people are really convined that "SANs" are a good idea. They string another complete network, generally alongside an existing IP network, typically using faster links, running proprietary protocols to provide remote simulation of the appearance of a locally-attached disk drive.

I've yet to see such a setting where they wouldn't have gotten better performance and functionality by running IP over the new, higher-speed network, and use whatever protocols are the best fit for the data on a case-by-case basis. Once upon a time there was an "Network Disk" protocol for providing remote access to something designed to look like a raw drive; Suns used to use it for diskless booting, way back when. It wasn't terribly nice, though, and when remote filesystem access became available and useable for booting, nd disappeared without a trace and nobody missed it.

I'm glad NetApp isn't trying to shove into the SAN fray; leave that turf to the aging, overpriced dinosaurs, desperately searching for new markets now that fewer and fewer customers will pay their premium prices for drive farms to attach to mainframes.

-Bennett