Over the weekend, at a party, I had a chat with a guy who proclaimed “the death of SAN”. His hypothesis was that Amazon S3 could outSAN SAN any day of the week.

My natural politeness led me to walk away instead of getting into a deep dive over beers, but what he was saying IS a sales pitch out there. Put another way, “Cloud storage is the death knell of local storage.”

I have my opinions, backed by facts, perhaps colored by signing up with S3 this weekend for business backup. What  are your thoughts about that pitch? Was he right?