"ps. $5000 for 72gb seems to come from a vendor that sells Redundant Arrays of Inordinately expensive Disks. Is the performance and reliability really better than say http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ ?" Remember when half the country believed that Saddam Hussain personally knocked down the NYC towers and seemingly nobody wanted to disagree? I think there are quite a few similar situations in storage today. Myth: highly managed storage reduces labor cost by reducing the cost of managing and provisioning storage. Reality: highly managed storage often comes with a price premium that, for many small and medium sized businesses, more than offsets any potential reduction in labor savings. Myth: storage provisioning and integration are the greatest challenges faced by IT shops today. Reality: performance, throughput and guaranteed performance are equally important for many of us, but somewhere along the way that message has gotten lost. Myth: ROI on high-end storage is positive b/c you can upgrade the higher end units Reality: price out the cost to upgrade, and often it's cheaper to just chuck the high end SAN or NAS and buy a new one... Make sure you're sitting down before asking about trade-in credit for your 12-month-old six- or seven-figure storage solution And yet, Apple can make a solid 5.6TB fiber-enabled box for 14 large or whatever it is, and nobody's going to buy it because it doesn't come with some fancy provisioning software or a chassis whose internal components can be upgraded two years later for 70% of the original purchase cost. Go figure. Bob -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l