As companies adopt IPs for data movement internally and externally, openness and nonproprietary SAN architectures could rule for storage management and disaster recovery. EMC's Enterprise Storage Network approach can do just fine in this scenario, but storage over IP doesn't hold quite the luster of an entirely new architecture dedicated to storage and data sharing. Storage over IP also changes the dynamics of management and cost, creating openings for competitors such as Network Appliance. However, performance challenges of sharing huge data packets over the same IP networks on which everything else travels could swing IT back in favor of a separate network for storage. Growing e-businesses are likely to choose whatever approach reduces information latency.
Time is money - or rather, data.