...a more interesting article summary would read "a number of issues will keep HDDs from closing the performance gap with flash for some time". I'm not willing to give a vendor money for more space: I already have too much - and new PC's ship with more GB than an average user will ever fill.

But as a consumer I will pay for more speed: especially since switching from HDD to SSD is a material improvement (as opposed to spending the same upgrade money on a CPU that's 15% faster). And businesses definitely see the benefits, especially in common virtualized environments: where IOPs are precious and expensive to obtain with traditional HDD arrays. We could run a lot more VMs on the same RAM and CPU at work, once we slapped a couple SSDs in the drive trays.

I have a fileserver that will be fed replacement HDDs as they die, but that's it. Every other computer I touch gets nothing but SSDs.

The company I work for is involved in the Nuclear Work Management industry: and companies owning a "fleet" of reactors is common terminology. "Legendary Slashdot commenting"? (after carefully avoiding Google :) )

I'm another fan of backups to disks stitched together with ZFS. In the last year I've had two cases where "zfs scrub" started to report and correct errors in files one to two months in advance of a physical hard drive failure (I have it scheduled to run weekly). Eventually the drives faulted and were replaced, but I had plenty of warning, and RAIDZ2 kept everything humming along perfectly while I sourced replacements.

For offsite backups I currently rotate offline HDD's, but I should move to Cloud storage. Give a bit of my surplus space and bandwidth to someone like Symform, and in turn they give me a free little slice of the Cloud to have TrueCrypt archives mirrored into. Win-win!

Note: I work for a company that makes agents + their upgrades.

Others already mentioned you need agents to do a deep dive... lots of companies are running at least 2 of them (one from the vendor to handle the OS + hardware, one from a 3rd party to do "everything else").

To monitor and manage a large amount of systems you need to push the "smarts" of the system as far down as possible. Pure agentless/polling systems either run into network issues (saturate links with polling) or CPU issues (what do I do with these alarms?)... usually both. With an agent on each box a lot of intelligence about when to trigger an alarm and what to do about it is baked in, resulting in lower CPU use by whatever the "server" is, and network traffic only generated when something actually goes wrong.

You do end up with agentless tech built in anyways.. since synthetic transactions are so useful, and you'll always need simple periodic polls to make sure the agents are alive and healthy.

Mike