GopherVR?

Here's one, Cumulus Networks. A lot of Cisco switching gear is Linux underneath with a more familiar Cisco CLI.

That's some pretty old-school thinking there. For modern storage arrays with decent caching algorithms the level of RAID protection often has little to do with IO response time and throughput. I've dealt with DBAs who have insisted their archive and redo logs live on RAID-1 or RAID-10 storage because that's what they were taught oh-so-long-ago. They want me to carve out and dedicate four spindles for them to do RAID-1 on a storage array with nearly a thousand spinning disks in it. I've got a storage array with half a terabyte of cache or more, 100% write cache hits and 95+% read cache hits. 4 spindles vs 1000 servicing IO with some extra RAID overhead? Not a difficult call.

Maybe you should quit Initech and apply at Intertrode?

I believe it to also be common practice to sanitize production data that goes anywhere except where it's absolutely needed. The sensitive stuff in databases gets replaced with bogus data or whacked all together. If you had, say, credit card data on various prod servers there are regulatory reasons that would prohibit a straight mirror of that data to put on a test server to play with. Not to say they follow such regulations, but it may be reasonable that a test server was compromised and nothing of value was exposed.

Whamcloud? Really?

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...