[engendered]

"Hi there, I'm very open to constructive criticism on my project but I feel that your comment is more of a strawman than particularly useful in any way. I had a look back through your comments on other posts on HN and they seemed to have a similar tone."

So you don't attempt to prejudice only in your blog posts, it appears. This is one of the most sadly defensive responses by a blog author I've yet seen on here.

Where, exactly, is the strawman? Please point it out rather than desperately trying to immunize against my completely valid comment in the most frantic of manners.

You posit an idealized notion about building it yourself based upon accomplishing, to this point, apparently very little. It's one thing to cast a theory and pursue it (e.g. "my attempt at building competitive storage on the cheap"), but you're presenting completely unsupported dogma around it, and then bolstering your own decisions by conclusions you actually don't even remotely have. It's the guy who decided to start working at a standing desk and on day one has a laundry list of comments about why anyone who doesn't is wrong and lesser.

This is a fairly typical, of course, and you see it by people who build their own anything ("don't give all your money to big TP -- six quick tips for making your own!"), and we generally only see it in the before stage, as the after stage is more often than not a littered debris field of failures.

I find it rather incredible that you attempt to incite HN guidelines, as if raw gullibility and boosterism was the direction of the critique. You are making broad claims in the linked article that you have absolutely no basis for making, so criticism is well deserved, and a service for anyone who might buy into this notion, making a fool of themselves in their own organization.

[moe]

Where, exactly, is the strawman?

The strawman is that he builds a solution for his exact needs and you attack it for not having features (multipathing, replication, automatic tiering, thin provisioning, disk-deduplication, streaming hardware compression) that neither he nor most people need.

All that stuff becomes interesting when and if you need more than two bricks. In a time where you can fit >250T of spindles or ~42T of SSDs into a single server the audience for such shrinks rapidly.

[engendered]

Is it irony that you're presenting an absurd strawman to demonstrate my purported strawman?

I "attacked" (aka disagreed with) any broadly-targeted, generalist claims of the linked article (which is in stark contrast with, for example, the Backblaze posts where they build very purpose-suited storage and never try to over-extend their claims), which was quite clearly that people who buy so-called enterprise storage are, to paraphrase the gist of the article, suckers. I noted replication and multipathing because they are the absolute minimum cost of entry for critical storage, and even the linked article references it as a requirement.

The rest of the features were clearly "value adds", given that most enterprise storage features a lot of its value in software. Yes, everyone benefits from automatic tiering. Everyone benefits from thin provisioning, disk-deduplication, and compression. There are a vanishingly small number of users who won't see significant benefits from all of those features.

"All that stuff becomes interesting when and if you need more than two bricks."

? Multipathing is absolutely critical for a single storage unit. Replication is absolutely critical if you have any care at all about uptime, because a single storage unit, even with multipathing and redundant power supplies and "controllers", as appropriate, isn't enough. The rest of them have nothing at all do do with the number of storage units -- thin provisioning gives you fantastic storage control. Compression is obvious. Disk-deduplication...again, the name of the game is minimizing the amount of data you're actually dealing with, because even if have conceptually unlimited storage in your unit(s), that's data you have to move around and replication and backup and...

[Spooky23]

Having a contrarian position isn't a crime.

Most enterprise arrays these days are really software dressed up behind the hardware. As a customer, you get to pay for the hardware multiple times. This is really obvious in the backup space if you compare a software-only solution like CommVault to Avatar/DataDomain.

If you make the conscious decison to invest in engineering talent and have a lot of need for midrange storage, you can yield a positive return on that investment. If you're growing fast and go EMC, you'll invest significant capital in administering those solutions and negotiating anyway.

But if you don't have the resources to staff it, or the systems for provisioning/service management to replace the consoles you get from a vendor product, you don't belong in the business.

[dang]

Criticism is fine. Gratuitous negativity is not. Your comments routinely have a lot of that, and it's time for it to stop. Please stick to the substance and drop the personal bile from now on.