I was told IBM's ESS (Shark) is capable of that too. Not sure if it really does. It doesn't actually require much "intelligence" (I'd say even less than Geraldo) to pre-fetch the next stripe size whenever full stripe size chunk requests are received. Whether that is "smart" is a different question. Mladen Gogala wrote: > Now, that would only be possible if your SAN apparatus is more > intelligent then Geraldo Rivera. Not that it's very hard, > but the only type of SAN device that can recognize patterns is EMC > Symmetrix (the very top of the line) and they are > prohibitively expensive. > -- Regards Wolfgang Breitling Centrex Consulting Corporation www.centrexcc.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l