Re: AC
"....A better question is will external arrays of any kind exist 5 years down the road?..." Not all storage scenarios require ultimate speed, some require large amounts of space at low cost (such as archives). Arrays still offer simplest and most cost-effective and space-effective provisioning of storage - local storage has advantages in speed but leads to inefficient distribution of storage (lots of wasted space in each server as opposed to little wasted in a centralised array). Whilst scalable architecture where server nodes are compute and storage nodes (AKA the Intel dream), they do not offer the simplicity of scale advantages of monolithic arrays. I predict arrays are going to be around for a while yet.