My experience with SANs is that they are anything but consistent. Local storage is a better idea: fewer moving pieces to go wrong, fewer moving pieces to understand and debug, fewer possible sources of contention, and the latency is low.
SANs in a cloud environment optimize for the wrong thing. Servers by and large have a high uptime -- since their falling over is comparatively rare, this is simply a problem I've never had difficulty with. What I have had in spades, before I learned better, were database problems due to wild fluctuations in latency to the SAN.
It doesn't help that when SANs kick the bucket, they tend to affect a lot of things.
The context where SANs make sense, IMO, is when you've got a few servers which need to share stuff (VMs, or whatever). So, essentially everything can fit on one $10k 10GE switch. I've personally never screwed with anything >800TB, too.
Rather than "strictly local storage", I'd say "keep storage as local as possible", but there are absolutely times where keeping it in-chassis isn't optimal.
