Re:I had a related question (Score 1)

Hmm. It would be a challenge to implement a parallel filesystem across your storage appliances (if that is what the netapp/bluearc products are).

A traditional SAN breaks up the path components, so that you could access the same disks with multiple disk controllers, with those controllers pointing to different host bus adapters inside the attached servers. I'm guessing your appliances put all (or at least the majority) of the path--disks, controller(s), network stack, protocols--in a sealed box, so access to those disks is limited to the appliance. Not very scalable from a parallel filesystem standpoint.

There is a nice overview of SANs at Wikipedia. For product specifics, you'll want to check out SAN vendors: EMC, HP, IBM...