[engendered]

Most people simply don't need this kind of storage anymore.

But this is exactly the sort of storage the linked article is talking about. So your point is that I attacked a "strawman" because I didn't accept the linked article for being something entirely different from what it is?

but the large majority of companies aren't

The majority of mid to large sized companies run entirely on SANs. I'm not sure where you get your information from, but how shoestring upstarts operate has nothing to do with much of the "real world".

This article is about a home-brew SAN, with home-brew SAN qualities and deficiencies.

[moe]

Ugh, I managed to fatfinger-delete my parent comment, sorry.

(the essence was what you quoted: I claimed most people don't need these advanced SAN-features anymore because they don't need SANs in the traditional sense anymore)

Anyway, I'll just concede that OP aiming for feature-parity with commercial SAN's is indeed nonsensical.

The majority of mid to large sized companies run entirely on SANs

For large companies who bought into EMC/NetApp that may be true.

For small and mid-sized companies that's definitely not my experience.

[bkeroack]

Every company that runs on AWS is dependent upon SAN (eg, EBS). I imagine it's similar for other cloud services.

Just because you've never seen one or had to deal with one directly does not mean you're not dependent on one.

[moe]

Every company that runs on AWS is dependent upon SAN

I think the discussion was about running your own SAN, i.e. creating your own EBS.

As it happens EBS itself is not backed by a SAN either. According to the rumors it's implemented using either DRBD or GNBD.