[ChuckMcM]

I don't disagree, but will share a bit of my reasoning with you.

Two network ports. This takes the top of rack switch out of the picture in terms of failure zones. If you're using 64 port switches, having one drop dead is annoying in that it takes out a disproportionate share of the other resource.

Agreed that they don't have to be 10G, 1G minimum. There a funny story about the product guys at BigCorp saying 100MB was ok, and platform-networking folks arguing for GB. Needless to say the improvement when moving to GB was much better than 10x because the product guys were not thinking cross traffic loads clearly.

Storage distributed to the cloud is much much more effective than storage in a pod. Amazon is kindof figuring this out, Google figured it out about 10 years ago. Once you get to that point you realize you can push computation into the storage and that not only gives you resiliency in the face of module failure it make return from disaster faster (something the Joyent people might have a better appreciation for at this point).

32 full speed SATA ports give you 3,200 Magnetic IOP/s and 25,000 Silicon IOP/s. There are literally legion the number of things that you cannot do on one drive with at best 250 IOP/s and insufficient cache space.