• Storage setups (in a SAN) are an art unto themselves. The usual way to get around contention for disk resources is to zone the SAN. This is akin to setting up a vlan (short story - private network for certain servers).

    You can usually get better performance with direct attached storage, up to a point. Multi terrabyte datawarehouse databases, etc. may underperform in DAS, where on a properly setup SAN, they will shine. Plus, you can beat the redundancy of a properly setup SAN to overcome hardware failures.