Your VAR should be doing a lot of that work for you - sure you need to understand licensing but if you have a good rep they should be providing you with up to d

Your VAR should be doing a lot of that work for you - sure you need to understand licensing but if you have a good rep they should be providing you with up to date info on all of this. HDD replacement is trivial and some COLOs can even do it for you - and any good vendor will have a thing setup where your appliance automatically notifies them and a new drive is overnighted to your COLO. Sure - maybe a few times a year you drive out to swap a drive. If you do not have good monitoring setup then that is entirely fixable - there are many stellar solutions these days out there. Hardware is easier than ever.