3 ms·

that's like complaining a bentley is too expensive and not good at moving your piano. when you get fined $1mil/min by the SEC for downtime, and data loss or co

that's like complaining a bentley is too expensive and not good at moving your piano. when you get fined $1mil/min by the SEC for downtime, and data loss or corruption can cost you in the hundreds of millions, or someone dying at a hospital, enterprise gear is cheap. reliability is the key and for what you are paying. now yes, there may be a specific consumer drive more reliable than a specific enterprise drive. so which do you buy? well the enterprise array vendor tested the crap out of everything in every combination and workload and environment, and picked one for you, and it comes with full support and SLAs that you can use to meet gov regulations. performance for an enterprise drive is not something you usually consider, at all. in fact, did you know that when I quote a storage array, I can't even specify the drive type of vendor, and who knows what will get shipped? Ionly specify drive size. your performance comes from all your workloads clumped together, spread over a thousand of these drives connected with infiniband, with dedupe and compression on the backend, and hundreds of terabytes of RAM. the perf of an individual drive is not relevant. but yes, sticking it into an AMD server you bought on newegg when they had a sale is not its purpose, and is a very bad deal. now when we talk about wise sysadmins, we're talking about guys who know their stuff, and do "important big stuff." not a guy at a small business ordering from newegg. and that guy - he shouldn't be coming up with any storage policies because he lacks the needed large-scale experience. I sold a 1PB usable-effective (after 3x dedupe/compression) space storage array last year. It was $2mil, after a 65% discount. If one time in its 5year lifecycle the "enterprisey" stuff on that array prevents about 10 seconds of downtime, it paid for itself.

wongarsu 3y ago
Sure, and judging by System Z sales there's still a demand for earthquake-resistant machines with hot-swappable CPUs. But for most of us, infrequent downtime is acceptable, and most single-machine downtimes are either automatically mitigated or have very limited impact. In that scenario, getting a prosumer SSD and over-provisioning it can be a sensible choice.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  * Hetzner joined the chat
renonce 3y ago
There are many other ways to get reliability at the software level, usually via redundancy. Even enterprise level SSDs doesn't guarantee you free of data losses and downtimes, you have to back them up regularly and preferably set up high availability for the database.
- usernew 3y ago
  cool. so I have a few thousand VMs of various OSs and hypervisors, a few hundred home-built applications with an average of 10 components each, some mainframe, some ibm-i, a bunch of linux, solaris, aix, and HP-UX server, and I'm using mysql, sql server, postgres, oracle, and a couple of DB2. there may be an informix DB or two somewhere - I don't know, I manage storage. about ten different volume managers, about 30 different filesystems - and some raw disks of course. 10PB total space, it needs to be metro cluster replicated ten miles away for active/active, and async in a different state can be about a minute behind max. So, write me some software that's going to make all that work and make the storage highly available. make sure it works for everything. you're exposed to solutions that make that work, daily. when you swipe your credit card buying condoms - you have no idea how much happens so your transaction doesn't get lost, corrupted, or errored out.
  - the_third_wave 3y ago
    > you have no idea how much happens so your transaction doesn't get lost, corrupted, or errored out. Maybe he doesn't, maybe he does - you don't know nor do I. I'm pretty sure this is how IBM salesmen used to respond when confronted with those newfangled Unix systems which were starting to appear here and there, nibbling first, then taking larger bytes out of their market share. Instead of the litany of diverse systems they'd have thrown LPARs, SYSPlexs and ESMs around but in the end it still came down to the same thing: this stuff is too complicated to be left to amateurs. They were right, in a way... until those amateurs grew their wisdom teeth and took a large part of their market away from them. Yes, "enterprise" stuff is complicated - often overly so [1] - and it has its place. This does not make it the only viable solution to these problems, something will eventually come up to eat your lunch just like IBM saw its herd of dinosaurs being overtaken by those upstart critters from the undergrowth. Maybe some smart software system which "guarantees" data reliability and availability without the need for "enterprise" storage devices? It wouldn't be the first time after all. [1] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

wongarsu 3y ago

Sure, and judging by System Z sales there's still a demand for earthquake-resistant machines with hot-swappable CPUs. But for most of us, infrequent downtime is acceptable, and most single-machine downtimes are either automatically mitigated or have very limited impact. In that scenario, getting a prosumer SSD and over-provisioning it can be a sensible choice.

geraldhh 3y ago
* Hetzner joined the chat

renonce 3y ago

There are many other ways to get reliability at the software level, usually via redundancy. Even enterprise level SSDs doesn't guarantee you free of data losses and downtimes, you have to back them up regularly and preferably set up high availability for the database.

usernew 3y ago
cool. so I have a few thousand VMs of various OSs and hypervisors, a few hundred home-built applications with an average of 10 components each, some mainframe, some ibm-i, a bunch of linux, solaris, aix, and HP-UX server, and I'm using mysql, sql server, postgres, oracle, and a couple of DB2. there may be an informix DB or two somewhere - I don't know, I manage storage. about ten different volume managers, about 30 different filesystems - and some raw disks of course. 10PB total space, it needs to be metro cluster replicated ten miles away for active/active, and async in a different state can be about a minute behind max. So, write me some software that's going to make all that work and make the storage highly available. make sure it works for everything. you're exposed to solutions that make that work, daily. when you swipe your credit card buying condoms - you have no idea how much happens so your transaction doesn't get lost, corrupted, or errored out.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  > you have no idea how much happens so your transaction doesn't get lost, corrupted, or errored out. Maybe he doesn't, maybe he does - you don't know nor do I. I'm pretty sure this is how IBM salesmen used to respond when confronted with those newfangled Unix systems which were starting to appear here and there, nibbling first, then taking larger bytes out of their market share. Instead of the litany of diverse systems they'd have thrown LPARs, SYSPlexs and ESMs around but in the end it still came down to the same thing: this stuff is too complicated to be left to amateurs. They were right, in a way... until those amateurs grew their wisdom teeth and took a large part of their market away from them. Yes, "enterprise" stuff is complicated - often overly so [1] - and it has its place. This does not make it the only viable solution to these problems, something will eventually come up to eat your lunch just like IBM saw its herd of dinosaurs being overtaken by those upstart critters from the undergrowth. Maybe some smart software system which "guarantees" data reliability and availability without the need for "enterprise" storage devices? It wouldn't be the first time after all. [1] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...