True, but it's not as though the 10X expense is for nothing. A SAN enables a lot more than local storage. I didn't mean to suggest that there wasn't a way to achieve lower costs on storage hardware directly, just that in practice, for a variety of reasons, that quoted cost is not representative.
And in case of database it doesn't give you much. You still need 2 nodes for redundancy, if you don't need a rack's worth of storage for that database, using SAN for that is waste of money.
I know the corporate idea of "everything on SAN, nothing outside of SAN" very well, it's just plainly solving political problems, not techncial ones.
Your understanding of SAN usage is narrow, and incorrect in the case of my organization.
One major benefit that SAN-backed database storage provides us is, when combined with VMs, enables us to spin up another database instance against already existing data in the SAN (i.e. a staging DB that looks at prod data).
