[al_biglan]

I work for the company that provided the storage for this. Our product is not a collection of commodity components but instead something very much more like an "appliance" that provides the performance at scale that NOAA needs. In general, one of the trends we see/fight is the "Hey, we can get components ourselves and use Lustre to build what we need" And.... they are spot on right. What you need to consider doing this is the amount of maintaining and administering that comes with this solution. The trade-off we see is that some groups, "Academia" for example, will prefer the cheaper solution because they have Grad Students, Post Docs and Undergrad research folks to help make the people cost free. Others, who just want to buy something that works in their infrastructure without adding the people costs would prefer to buy something ready made that "just works"

Bottom line: If you are using your system to get work done, the trend is to spend the money for reliability and availability. If you want to save money, it comes at a price (but is certainly do-able)

Related: Look at Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft... they are large enough to build their custom systems themselves. Not everyone operates at this scale. Individuals can buy a cheap PC and build a NAS... or they can buy one from Netgear, Buffalo, QNAP that "jsut works" at a price premium.