[AaronFriel]

I really wish one of the big hardware vendors would just start shipping validated, certified and warrantied Open Compute Project hardware at the substantial savings that can be had from it. Or maybe I'm ignorant here and there are little savings to be had.

The rest of this post is just a rant from my perspective in the SMB space.

In my space, everything that's worth getting is too expensive, and everything else is crap. The switch and storage market is a racket, as near as I can tell, where every opportunity to get you to pay another 20 or 30 percent premium over what you had before is taken with selling you features you don't want or can't use. Software defined storage is, ultimately, limited by your network. Software defined networking is here (OpenFlow, network virtualization) but SDN is being used as a value-add to get customers to pay even more. The result is that software designed storage is a crapshoot (only as high quality as the network) and whether or not you save money is debateable.

Shared storage is a tremendous racket because adding "SAS" to anything doubles or triples its price. Consumer SSDs are advancing the state of the art much faster than enterprise tech (which tends to accommodate slower purchasing cycles and longer service lifetimes), but to get an older, slower SSD for a shared SAS JBOD means paying five or six times as much per gigabyte.

I really want a virtual SAN that doesn't suck, and a network that doesn't cost $1000 dollars per port to connect a handful of servers. Alas, it doesn't look like anything like that is coming soon.

[wmf]

In theory you just need an interposer to use SATA drives in a SAS enclosure: http://www.dataonstorage.com/dataon-products/6g-sas-to-sata-... But that still doesn't solve the problem of the JBOD itself costing more than the disks (less so with SSD) or ZFS costing more than hardware RAID, etc.

For (relatively) cheap networking check out http://www.colfaxdirect.com/store/pc/home.asp

[AaronFriel]

I'll start with what I know firsthand: those interposers are not supported for many technologies, including Windows Server Clustered Storage Spaces. This is straight from DataOn storage reps.

And what I know second-hand: many SATA SSDs have terrible failure modes in the form of RESET storms when behind an interposer. That is, you can end up in a situation where you have to shut down all hosts attached to the SSDs and power them off before they return to life. Not a good situation. The interposers apparently greatly exacerbate this problem.

I will check out your link on networking, thank you :)

[tacticus]

the interposer just provides the dual port failover that sas ports have.

I have a number of sata drives in sas ports atm and all i lose is dual controller support

[aristus]

You mean like these?

http://www.penguincomputing.com/products/open-compute-soluti...

They are not tier 1, but Penguin has been around for quite a long time.