[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.