A little off-topic, but if you're moving from one vendor's storage virtualization approach to another's, I agree that you may need to do some sort of painful host-based migration. But if you're buying storage from multiple vendors you're basically stuck doing a lot of host-based migrations anyhow. Throwing storage virtualization into the mix means you'll only need to do this when you want to change virtualization vendors rather than every time you buy another storage array.

There is somewhat of a lock-in factor with storage virtualization, but it sure can be useful once you've got it. For completely non-disruptive data migration the work what would otherwise take months for a team of people can be scripted by one person and trickled over in a few weeks.

It's the same as an 'old school' monkey. You can recognize them by their gold chains and Adidas.

Or shell script...

How many of these 2.0TB SATA drives are you going to purchase to do the same number of random cache miss IOPS that a single SSD can do? The math does not lie, applications are out there that can gain massive performance improvements and save money at the same time using SSDs. It's so easy to say hey, re-architect your application. Guess what? Mission critical apps grow organically and are not always optimized. How heavily used will your application get before even your optimized IO creeps into the realm of "I/O patterns so messed up that today's horrendous SSDs actually lower your cost per I/O"? How much money do you think the bank/nation-wide retailer/wall street firm would need to spend to "rethink their information architecture"? Not to mention power and cooling of a room full of short-stroked 2TB SATA disks vs one cabinet of SSDs.

SSD is not gaining traction simply because it's a buzzword and commands huge profit margins (both are true). It works. It solves real problems. In the right cases it saves money. If you spent some time in a larger organization I suspect you'd change your tune. You're comparing 2TB SATA apples to 256GB SSD oranges. Both may be fruit, but they're not interchangeable.

How many multi-petabyte enterprise data centers have you seen running SSDs as their primary storage? None. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Agreed that SSDs have a long way to go on price to compete, but it's simply not true that they're not yet ready for the enterprise datacenter. All the larger enterprise storage array vendors (EMC, HDS, IBM, NetApp) say they're ready, and most are shipping them with decent sales. Despite their price and the "fact" you've so eloquently stated, you'll find them in many Fortune 500 datacenters simply because they outperform spinning disks by such a factor that they're cheaper per IO. I believe today the vast majority of vendors providing enterprise-class SSD drives are sourcing them from STEC. They play some tricks to work around write limits, but they've got ~5 year MTBF ratings.

Yes, sorry to say it was in fact all for nut.

In reality, it's probably not as much of an IQ test of a potential employer as it is a test of potential employers' first line of HR flunkies. I've dealt with some painfully inept recruiters/HR people for otherwise respectable companies. You may be missing out on a good employment opportunity instead of dodging the bullet you refer to.