[lamontcg]

> as long as you’ve got a capable team looking after it who chooses standard and robust software.

And cheap.

If you put people in charge who are looking for ways of expanding their empire and budget through spending money on EMC/VMWare/Oracle/etc/etc then you can quickly wind up spending a lot more money.

Simplistic network designs, simplistic server designs, simplistic storage designs with mostly open source software used everywhere can be highly competitive with Cloud services.

Mostly all that Amazon did to create AWS/EC2 was to fire anyone who said words like SAN or EMC and do everything very cheaply using open source software, and evolved away from Enterprise vendors and towards commodity hardware.

If you make "frugality" a core competency in your datacenter design like Amazon did, then you can easily beat the cloud.

You also need to have [dev]ops people who are inclined to say "yes" to the business and who know how to debug things and can operate independently of needing to phone up EMC.

[derefr]

> fire anyone who said words like SAN

Is EBS not, itself, a SAN?

[lamontcg]

If you narrowly focus on the words outside of the context of what "SAN" has meant in the industry for decades now, yes it is. But no, it isn't.

[derefr]

Can you explain more? Because I honestly don't know enough about SANs to know the difference.

To me, a "Storage Area Network" is 1. a cluster of disk-servers, serving the role of exposing logical block-storage over a protocol like iSCSI (whether directly to client machines, or managed and dynamically allocated by hypervisor software like vSphere), where 2. machines are connected to that storage cluster over a dedicated network interface, to keep LAN/WAN packets from contending for throughput with SAN packets.

By that definition, EBS is definitely a SAN. (And technically, so is my two-drive NAS, if I configure it as an iSCSI target and then run a second switch that connects to its second network port and my workstation's second network port.)

Does "SAN" imply some specific internal architecture for the storage cluster or something?

And, if so, then what do you call the type of thing that EBS is?

[webmaven]

> Does "SAN" imply some specific internal architecture for the storage cluster or something?

It implies purchasing dedicated hardware. SANs are CAPEX heavy solutions.

> And, if so, then what do you call the type of thing that EBS is?

If you insist, you could call EBS a SAN-as-a-Service, I suppose.

[throwaway823882]

EBS is absolutely SAN-as-a-Service, and it's fantastic.

For a SAN, not only do you have to become a "storage expert", but their individual limitations will leave you with thousands of hours of wasted time and effort, constrain your architecture, and hold back your application's development.

For EBS, you don't need to know anything about storage. You just say "Give me some space and attach it to any VM I want" and you have it. "Expand that space" and you have it. "Give me a snapshot" and you have it. "Give me a bunch of performance guarantees" and you have it. "Make it all encrypted": Done.

You don't need to maintain it, repair it, upgrade it. No maintenance windows to apply a firmware patch. No waiting for someone to buy, deliver, and install a new storage array to get more space. No hoping your hardware has the right interconnects. No upgrading switch backbones to deal with performance issues. And I'm not even a storage person! I'm so happy that I don't deal with SANs anymore.

[throwaway823882]

No, EBS is reliable.