Kayem

I completely agree with your points. Again, I was speaking to people who manage their own SANs, and may be looking to use the Cloud as an additional tier of storage, with the same reliability as a local array. Reliable in the sense that they would never have to worry about Internet latency, network nodes going down, or anything else that they have absolutely no knowledge or control over and could potentially affect the performance/operation of an application, ultimately disabling me from meeting business requirements.

If there are no business requirements to meet, I have no arguments, the Cloud is where I'm at!

"Everything fails occassionally. Amazon probably ..."

I wish I could use that line to explain to my company why our business has come to a complete halt.

Granted, your business is completely web-based and in the cloud, which is why I specifically made a mention to system admins why the cloud is not reliable enough to be a high-level tier of storage yet. Why doesn't that make sense? I wasn't trying to offend you or your decisions.

Also, yes, my company and my SAN supplier would have staff on-site. But we have control over our own hardware, so there's really no comparison.

An unfortunate event, however, re-iterates to system admins why the cloud should only be used as a low tier of storage -- for now.

Anything run by greed is crash-prone.