@ Anonymous Coward..
"Whereas when the all eggs one basket corporate EMC NAS box fails"
You mean you don't have a failover strategy for important data?
Yeah, I know, cost and budget. They're the things that hamstring us from having a perfect world (or at least a better world).
I'm personally a fan of keeping things in more than one place; distributed and heterogenous has the tendancy to be more resilient than monolithic and homogenous. A dual boot of your primary OS, and a secondary, with file formats in ODF where possible leaves you the option of keeping going and soldiering on through an awfull lot of dire scenarios. Yes, it means your users have a harder job of learning both OSs, but guess what? People learn; they're actually pretty good at it. And the first time something "dire" happens and they have something to fall back on, the smug looks they all have with their friends when they say "look what we did when it all went bad" is amazing.
Beer because I could use one about now.