I have been basically psyched out by some of the sales consultants from enterprise vendors such as EMC and NetApp.
We have a new requirement to store around 30 TB of unstructured data, and around 100-200 GB of structured data (mostly MySQL). I am considering setting up couple of JBODs which are custom built running FreeNAS, OpenFiler or OpenSolaris for the unstructured Data. The total cost with redundancy and backup is coming to less than 10,000 USD for me.
For the latter, I am planning to use a standard HP DL-180 G6 Server RAID 1 ( 2 SAS Drives), with an incremental backup to a backup system.
The entire cost is working out less 12,000 USD.
The files inside the JBOD are often accessed by a web application used by some of our mobile workforce. Presently the data size of files are less than 1 TB, but this should increase to 20-22 TB in next 2 years time. Also the number of users accessing may also go up. That means this would be accessed very often. Something like 20-25 concurrent users at any point of time, and during peak may be about 250.
Sales consultants from the so-called enterprise vendors have been asking us to move the infrastructure to their boxes, which with all licensing will cost us 50,000-55,000 USD ( 32 TB Storage Array).
Spending 40,000 USD extra is a lot of money, and we would like to save.
However I would like to take more opinions on the right strategy. What more should I do to make data more secure and not compromise on performance