You don't REQUIRE an external chassis. I just had this discussion with one of my clients. He was under the impression he was going to get a 1u server or similar and then an external sas array attached to the back. While that's fine, you can simply get a Dell PE server with 12 bays and 600GB SAS drives. Two of those in RAID0 plus a software solution and you completely destroy the price point of any SAN appliance.
While I would imagine in the better end gear you get better snap and VSS addon modules for exchange/sql etc. I would like to see some people compare some of these software devices against hardware SANS. At the end of the day the spindle and backplane and memory can only be so fast compared to a hardware vendor. While Starwind has a 3rd party report saying they are at 3,250 IOPS (?) I have seen Datacores SanSymphony 'reportedly' break 50,000 IOPS and break some records (according to their site) I have no idea what a standard 50k lefthand box gets you, or if IOPS is even the base at which you should compare raw speed/power. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
