Bytemark's Cloud Servers went all in on network storage from 2012, 10 years after our first platform that only used local storage. The main motivation was so a

Bytemark's Cloud Servers went all in on network storage from 2012, 10 years after our first platform that only used local storage. The main motivation was so all our servers would be live-migratable in case of hardware trouble, but it also means customers aren't having to choose between "local and fast" or "remote and flexible" - we've spent years making "remote and fast" work smoothly. But yes it was a hard road to get there, particularly in the days when Linux's 10Gbps drivers and btrfs were less good than they are now, and we also needed to write a new NBD server for all the live migration to work smoothly (https://github.com/BytemarkHosting/flexnbd-c https://github.com/BytemarkHosting/flexnbd-c)