Comment Re:Engineering competence does give an edge (Score 2) 239
But the largest cost driver in storage is that people want to buy storage pre-configured and in a box that they do not need to understand. This is not only very expensive, (when I researched this 9 years ago, disk part of total price was sometimes as low as 15%!), but gives you lower performance and lower reliability. And also less flexibility.
You aint kidding. I have installed systems for people that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and they cant even give me basic information in order to complete the install. How many disks to each head? No Idea. How big do you want your RAID groups? No idea. Excuse me sir this IP and Gateway are in different subnets can I have another? That last one has actually happened more than once.