[KaiserPro]

EMC are expensive and nimble are ok for light VM performance.

However they provide a service. As the OP says its a bit broad to claim that they are a pointless cost. Having dealt with both, I can tell you that its very rare that own brand storage is cheaper in the long term. Unless: o you run at significant scale o have enough data to warrant a team of skill storage admins

bear in mind that decent storage admins cost the same as a medium sized array, per year, per person. Opex can quickly over take capex.

[mrmondo]

Actually we've found quite the opposite, because proprietary vendor management tools are generally hard to automate and integrate with existing frameworks such as puppet - the time it takes to administer them is far greater than any of our more standard systems. I just replied to a similar observation from someone else here: http://smcleod.net/building-a-high-performance-ssd-san/#comm...