[raides]

I am curious on the hardware build out used for the storage nodes. Some of the major issues I have seen with all the appliances out there for storage are the following:

1. Network throughput on the appliance is fast but for an Enterprise level the 10gigE cards used become a bottleneck for transactions because of how the software hypervisor scales the data. 2. Power consumption of the appliances in a rack mount environment are too high and leave needed space that has to stay empty because of the facility power per rack limitations. 3. The software hypervisor scales the stack vertically and relies on the software to load balance horizontally. The performance in a high transactional environment becomes dependent on the software to scale instead of the natural horizontal distribution that can be setup on the hardware out of the box. Standard multi-purpose storage arrays scale horizontal with very little over head from traditional software storage management. I only found one company whose software does not force the stack to be vertical but they fail to meet a reasonable performance in network/power.

Streaming petabytes of data to keep a dynamic constant (static overall storage requirement that changes it's data life cycle via retention rules) becomes very hard with premade hardware.

Does anyone have any recommendations or has attempted a similar exodus from S3 that they can share?