Re: Hmmm... But why?
I agree with you that servers should have internal storage, particularly for temp areas which do not need to be on shared storage.
If you think that fibre-channel is slow, then I'm afraid you're just wrong. Simple as that. Fibre-channel may be slower than attaching a flash device directly to a system, but there are reasons for shared storage, and those reasons are still as valid now as they were when we all started using shared storage. Ethernet is a crap conduit for storage, which is why it's still a drop in the ocean compared with FC.
You mention million+ IOs. Of course, anyone who knows anything about storage will know that IOPs is a valueless metric: it's a big number to shout about and is only used for marketing reasons as it's a crude way of comparing one thing with another.
What's actually important is latency, which is what this article is about.
I'm a big proponent of DIY storage such as Ceph. It has its place and can provide a relatively cost-effective way of getting a half decent storage system. It has its drawbacks though:
- You have to build it yourself. This takes time.
- You have to maintain it yourself. So if the guy who set it up leaves the company, or is on holiday or ill, and you have an outage that you can't fix, then you lose your business and you're all out of jobs. That's the main reason people are willing to spend money on enterprise storage.
- While you might be using off-the-shelf hardware, this is typically servers with some disks shoved in the front. The storage vendors also use off-the-shelf nowadays, but they use dedicated disk enclosures and fewer servers, which means far less power consumption and far higher capacity density. Data centres cost money.
I'm not sure why you single out Veeam, but I do know the product and I do know that they're a business and like all businesses they care about their customers. If getting it to work smoothly with IBM is something their customers need, then that's what they'll do.
As for your last paragraph, this sums up your lack of understanding entirely. The infrastructure on which a business runs its IT is entirely valueless. The continued functioning of the business is the only thing which ultimately has any value. If it were able to function more efficiently in today's world with something other than computing then it would. Businesses don't set out to buy servers, networks or storage systems: they want something which allows their business to reliably function.
People pay a lot of money to the likes of IBM (I don't work for them by the way) because they trust them to provide the means to allow their business to run. This will naturally include software, hardware and the networking to connect it all together but those are low down on the list.
So yes, a couple of techies could quite easily screw together a system with decent performance and basic functionality for a fraction of the price, but if they leave the company, go sick or just realise they don't know what to do when it all goes tits up, then the cheap price you paid goes down the pan with the rest of your business. That is why people pay millions of dollars. They're not the stupid ones.