Re: So long, SAN
"...massive amount of overhead if your having to transmit the data of a VM from one host to another." - replication of storage and servers is still required when you deploy a SAN. That's when you guy a second SAN and put it in a second data room/centre and replicate using Dataguard or SRDF. The overhead is already there, I just don't see the need for a second fibre network when we have 10GEth already.
"crappy cloud providers" - I agree with you here, the cloud providers, albeit hideously expensive, have their business success only because departments are not getting any new IT resources from their CIO. Now, the business has to continue, so the stationary budget is burned for buying some cloud servers.
Yes, SAN had it's advantages 10 years ago. But when I see the internal cost charging, like, £1/day for 1GB of Tier1 storage, this simply cannot stand. A 300MB MS Exchange inbox is just pathetic. Today, we have 2/3/4TB harddrives, it is easier than ever to buy high density, modular systems. And if you compare the costs of a £500K SAN system with just a £60K piggyback to add HDD/SSD storage to the existing Xeon servers, then SAN had its day.
So, btw, has the network, but you don't want to say this too loud unless you get 500 downvotes: when you have 60 - 200 VMs in one physical server, you have a great deal of network in there. And it's faster, too, as it transmits packets via the memory. So, the router is only between the physical machines, for which you use your 10GEth or Etherchannel. And with that you have enough bandwidth for your DR replication.