This also includes a dedicatd IP SAN with GIG server interfaces, dual geographically segregated 10GB interconnects between datacenters, datacenter costs, etc

We pay about $12/GB/year for storage on 15k FC disks with RAID-DP and replicated across town. This does not include backups to tape, that's an extra fee. We are also in the process of working out lower cost storage without replication and on SAS (or SATA) disk. It's really silly to compare consumer grade USB storage to enterprise, replicated and professionally supported storage but it happens all the time.

Developers have total control over their workstation and "Sandbox" lives there in a VM. Developers have limited rights to the "development" environment where they can test things like deployment process and make some changes. In TEST, they have no rights (can't even login) and in PROD obviously no rights. Patch also often exists and is used by SA's only. I work for a large university where we support a lot of different apps in a fairly heterogenious environment not one or two products like I have in the past in corporate environments, it works well IMO once the developers get the idea that they have to get things mostly right before moving into DEV.