I agree with what you said. I used Netapp around 2007 in one bank as iSCSI storage for a SQL Server solution, and later on in 2008 we selected it for a small online bank (80 employees,500 financial advisors, 20-30k customers) as crucial part of our infrastructure. We were able to design the IT infrastructure around it using it as CIFS file servers for internal Windows users, NFS datastore for the VMware infrastructure (we were almost all virtual) and iSCSI block access for some special machines (e.g. SQL Server) with relevant software in place for backups and with full sync metrocluster replica between the two sites. No FC host-access. It was clearly expensive, maybe not that exceptional performance-wise, but I'm quite sure even today you can't do it with all the new fancy storage vendors.At that time, we could have done it with EMC, but our experience with the sales process was opposite to the one reported by some here: during the 1st purchase for SQL, I was able to find a Netapp pre-sales technical guy that was very competent, while I struggled to get the right replies from an EMC reseller.

EDIT: I think I should probably add that the competent Netapp pre-sales guy moved to DataDomain, then Fusion-IO and now he's in PureStorage..