Please NetApp
Remember when NetApp used to be a nice company before they decided to out EMC, EMC.
NetApp was, and is, a one trick pony. They made a really slick filer with a solid, if costly, software head. Now they are trying to come up with the next OnTap as the other storage vendors have caught up with their dedup, compression and in some case surpassed their once unique snap functions.
I agree that tier one will not need to be used as often, but I don't see how that equals NetApp's advantage. NetApp is just a different variety of proprietary storage. If anything people will begin moving to the Hadoop style clusters of storage which run on a massive parallel file system and cheap disk, not a bunch of really expensive filers with tons of proprietary software and really expensive Flash. NetApp is basically saying the same thing that EMC is saying.
Also, mainframe, the FICON connection, is not "moribund" at all. It is growing if you follow the numbers, which makes sense as private cloud solutions are basically a roll your own mainframe. It is smaller than distributed systems, but that is not anything new.