Actually, yes...
I think that servers-in-arrays does have a place, and that place is where there are relatively low requirements in terms of numbers of servers but relatively high requirements in terms of availability.
Take a simple case of a small business that wants to run a couple of servers. Say Exchange and SQLServer, for example. Any highly available implementation of this is going to involve a fair amount of complexity in both physical and logical configuration. But storage arrays have a lot of high availability functions built in to them and so handling the 'server' side of things (which would basically be a pre-configured VM running on a lightweight hypervisor inside the storage array) would be relatively painless.
Given the complexity (and cost) of building out some sort of SAN configuration with multiple servers and storage arrays I can see this being a viable option for smaller companies, certainly. As to if larger shops or service providers would be interested in them, I think it would come down very simply to if they proved to be cheaper to manage and more reliable than the build-your-own variety.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
