[sytse]

I think a storage appliance (NetApp, etc.) makes a lot of sense in the short term. The TCO is lower since we'll spend a lot of time making Ceph work.

In the longer term the storage appliance will lock us in and will get very expensive. I've heard pretty bad stories of companies betting on it. Especially with many small files like us (IOPS heavy).

And one goal of GitLab.com is to gain experience that we can reuse at our customers. Most of our customers use a storage appliance now but are interested in switching to something open source.