Agreed. But this isn't even a solution you can't implement for legacy reasons. At any point you can do this, and you can probably do it live by taking it out

Agreed. But this isn't even a solution you can't implement for legacy reasons. At any point you can do this, and you can probably do it live by taking it out of the load balancer equation one at a time. In this case, centralizing storage makes sense. Pros: less stuff to manage, no more rsyncs, immediate feedback on all servers. Save money by only needing to buy 1/n amount of space (assuming the space required is significant) because you're only maintaining X GB centrally versus X GB * n servers. Cons: Money up front, increased latency to fetch data, but you're already waiting up to 5 minutes.