The bottom line here is that if you have the time and availability to jump in and replace the device (perhaps with a spare that you bought because you were saving so much money), a low-end unit might work for you.
Gauging the Cost of Downtime
The other side of the equation is who is relying on the data the device is storing. If you're a larger business using the device to store your workstation deployment images, you can probably get away without having it around for a day or two while you get a new device and restore the data. If you're a relatively small business and are using the device to provide the storage for all of your servers (virtualized or not), you really need to look at how much the absence of that data will cost you.
For example, imagine a small business that needs shared storage for a virtualization implementation. Let's say the company in question is a local insurance agency with 60 employees. They underwrite with a bunch of different insurance providers and have a document imaging system, so they have more servers than the average small business, which makes virtualization attractive. However, the relatively low number of users won't put a big transactional load on the storage, so a lower-end storage device works from a performance standpoint. The question becomes, do they spend $2,500 (or even less) on a lower-end NAS/SAN solution, or upwards of $20,000 on an enterprise-class SAN solution?
Well, who is supporting it? If a dedicated IT resource is on the payroll -- a somewhat unusual occurrence in small businesses -- that person may be well-suited to recover from a storage failure. Or not. If not, there's a good chance they will pick up the phone and call in some kind of outside contract help to diagnose the problem and work out a solution. Assuming that process takes a day or two, that cost could easily dwarf the cost of the storage device that just failed.
And who is depending on the storage? In our example, our 60 insurance agents and support staff suddenly have no access to most of the information they need to do their jobs. If a customer calls, they may have no idea what policies the customer has or how to resolve claims. In this sort of business, productivity will plummet to perhaps 10 to 20 percent of a normal day and cause the business significant embarrassment with customers. Suddenly, it starts to look as if the prospect of a one- or two-day outage might justify the cost of an enterprise device.
So be careful when you venture into the land of low-cost storage. Take a hard look at what your storage will be used for -- and how it's going to get fixed when it breaks -- before you congratulate yourself for saving a dump truck full of money. Sometimes, the dump truck you know is better than the one you never saw coming until it ran you over.
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