It's often hard to distinguish fact from fiction with SANs. With vendors over-promoting what's possible at the expense of what's truly practical, hype has become a bit of a habit. We often don't know or even notice the difference between the products of today and the promises of tomorrow. Will iSCSI provide a silver bullet for running SANs over IP? Is InfiniBand really all its cracked up to be? And what about complete Enterprise storage consolidation over Fibre Channel's director switches? These are just some of the topics that get vendors pumping speeds and feeds, and revving their hype meters to the red line. This paper gives Vixel's view of what customers really need from a SAN.