Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Storage blades seem like a waste to me. You're paying a good price for the enclosure in order to save money on power consumption, and then you put in something that is pure power consumption? It seems like an external JBOD attached to the blade enclosure's IO ports makes more sense. Maybe there's some feature to the storage blades I'm not aware of.

There aren't many advantages of storage blades over an external unit, beyond consistency in rack deployments and such. There is a possible gain with the IO going over the backplane of the enclosure instead of out over a cable, but probably not enough of a difference to be noticeable. It does eliminate some cabling, and allow for easy remote changes to what server can see what storage block.

For most of the hardware I'll need to help roll out, remote accessibility and reconfiguration will be nice to have. Ease of hardware rollout is also a factor, as (with luck) the product will be wildly successful and we will need a lot of servers online quickly to meet customer demand.