Indeed, this is another benefit, or, rather, a host of benefits, to using cheap, commodity parts.
This may not be the case at a startup outside of a technology hub and is almost certainly not the case where nobody in the company is competent with hardware[1].
Otherwise, a failure isn't just easy to correct but cheap, too. It's so cheap that keeping cold spares around is a no-brainer, unlike with the "gold-plated"[2] products.
The other danger is that the "engineer" who comes out to hand-deliver and install the replacement part gets it wrong. If he pulls the working, rather than failed, part[3], there's not much consequence for him personally or the vendor, unlike with startup founders or even staff.
In fact, even engineering it with enough hot spares to ride out its useful life. 4% AFR for your 88 disks? Just add 8 hot spares. Worried about cables or the controller card? Double up. Both together raises a $9k 1 gigaBYTE/second (4GB/s peak) array to a whopping $10k.
Even just doubling everything is likely to cost far less than a year of tarnished-bronze support from a big vendor.
[1] By which I mean assembling discrete consumer parts, not soldering or anything lower level.
[2] Personally, I prefer to refer to "enterprise" targeted pricing as "hookers and blow," but it is, admittedly, without a catchy adjective.
[3] Yes, I've had this happen. I've also watched a colleague pull the wrong drive out of an array, against his better judgment, at the insistence of the vendor's phone support.
This may not be the case at a startup outside of a technology hub and is almost certainly not the case where nobody in the company is competent with hardware[1].
Otherwise, a failure isn't just easy to correct but cheap, too. It's so cheap that keeping cold spares around is a no-brainer, unlike with the "gold-plated"[2] products.
The other danger is that the "engineer" who comes out to hand-deliver and install the replacement part gets it wrong. If he pulls the working, rather than failed, part[3], there's not much consequence for him personally or the vendor, unlike with startup founders or even staff.
In fact, even engineering it with enough hot spares to ride out its useful life. 4% AFR for your 88 disks? Just add 8 hot spares. Worried about cables or the controller card? Double up. Both together raises a $9k 1 gigaBYTE/second (4GB/s peak) array to a whopping $10k.
Even just doubling everything is likely to cost far less than a year of tarnished-bronze support from a big vendor.
[1] By which I mean assembling discrete consumer parts, not soldering or anything lower level.
[2] Personally, I prefer to refer to "enterprise" targeted pricing as "hookers and blow," but it is, admittedly, without a catchy adjective.
[3] Yes, I've had this happen. I've also watched a colleague pull the wrong drive out of an array, against his better judgment, at the insistence of the vendor's phone support.