I cannot tell you how many weird-ass storage systems I've decommissioned. Typically people go cheap, and are burned. It can be a year after deployment, or three

I cannot tell you how many weird-ass storage systems I've decommissioned. Typically people go cheap, and are burned. It can be a year after deployment, or three, but one thing all the cheap stuff seems to have in common is that it fails very, very badly just when you need it very, very badly. Usually at 3 in the morning. My philosophy today is that if the data is important at all, it's worthwhile going spendy and getting a SAN. Get a good one. I like Nimble a lot right now, but there are other good ones, too. (Don't believe crazy compression numbers or de-duplication quackery; I've told more than one SAN vendor to fuck off after they said they'd get 20:1 on our data, without doing any research on what our data was). Have everything backed up? Great! How long until you can go live again after water drips on your storage? If you spend a week waiting for a restore, that's indistinguishable from failure. If you wait a month for replacement hardware to be shipped, you might have killed your product.