Good article, some very good points I've also noticed as a critical observer.

1) Among other things, I do Cisco SAN, as in network side of storage. I'm amazed that no EMC tech I've ever talked to at a site knows what a FLOGI is or why it might be relevant. "Nothing but the GUI."

2) Microsoft was (still is) an early denier of network being less than perfect. File shares cause BSOD when the network is down. Worse, dragging a file across the Explorer for a file share (or the CD drive) causes a 10-20 second delay while the file system is accessed or something. That's just lame programming only tested on a fast LAN.

3) So to put one of your thoughts briefly, maybe SDS should allow us to specify ancillary configuration items, which depend on the specified characteristics (degree of reliability, redundancy, speed) we ask the SDS for?