Some interesting comments here from 3Par's marketing VP Craig Nunes, who claims that SATA arrays are now fully capable of supporting both online data and near-line archiving.

In touting the company's new "Nearline for Online" campaign, Nunes goes so far as to say that multi-tiered Fibre Channel networks will soon be a thing of the past, along with all of the automation software needed to shuttle data to the appropriate storage system.

To support his claim, Nunes points out that the newest SATA drives employ heavy striping and intelligent RAID technology to overcome the performance and recovery issues of the past. So as long as there is enough I/O capacity, a single storage tier should be able to handle virtually any application you care to throw at it.

This is some pretty bold talk for a utility storage vendor and is likely to bristle some spines over at Emulex, Cisco and other Fibre Channel heavies. But it only takes a spark to start a fire, and it's at least smart business to listen to someone claiming a cheaper, more efficient way of doing things.