SAN / Direct Attached storage

[update]

Been monkeying in the lab with some Sun/IBM/HP hardware - an EMC CX-80 and a few commodity MSAs.  Overall testing: Direct attached is better.  Shelves of 16 drives, RAID5, EXT3, 3TB MySQL volume, nominal DB load (50-50 R/W balance)  Turns out that the direct attached RAID controller gets to dedicate all memory/throughput to itself. (gee whiz!)  The SAN splits its cache among everyone using it (configurable, but besides the point).  With 10+ servers slamming the SAN, cache thrashing gets to the point where all the benefits of a SAN are moot.

[Original post]

Open Question:

What gives you better performance, SAN infrastructure, or Direct Attached? A SAN can leverage a fibre channel HBA, pretty snazzy. Direct Attached usually uses the same technology.

SAN allows you to use hot backup tools.

DA means you eliminate a single point of failure.

SAN allows you to resize partitions if you failed to realized the actual growth rate.

DA might be a little more battle-tested in small-medium size business world.

I hope to update this in the future.