This is a long thread, with lots of interesting and valid observations about the organisation of the industry, the segmentation of the market, getting what you pay for vs paying for what you want, etc.
I don't really find within, however, an answer to the original question, at least the way I read it. Perhaps that's the issue - that the question was asked without enough specifics and context, and so everyone has their own interpretation and their own answer to their own question. Remembering that a lot of this was branded and marketed as "open storage", the desire to mix and match components is not only natural, a clear expectation has been set that it should be possible and easy and open. That's not to say that you can expect to have your cake and eat it too. Certain combinations and permutations are more qualified, tested, supported and therefore expensive than others; these characteristics are part of what you should be able to "mix and match", understanding the full implications of each tradeoff choice. Snorcle wants to sell hardware. Sure, they want even more to sell a complete hardware and annual maintenance package with annuity revenue over multiple years with high markups. Some people are simply not customers for all of that, but might still be customers for the hardware. Especially these days, it seems they still would want to sell the hardware even when they can't sell the rest of the package. I read the following context between the lines of the original question: - I have or can source disk drives I'm comfortable using. - I understand that I'm not paying for, and can't expect, commercial support for whatever final combination I wind up with. - I am comfortable relying on standards and specifications for interoperability, enough that it's unlikely I'll have to get into deep debugging for problems. At least, I'm unwilling or unable to pay high premiums ahead of time in the hope of avoiding potential high costs for later problems. - The J4500 seems like nice hardware, and I know that at least it isn't likely to change unexpectedly to some different chipset not recognised by opensolaris, just before purchase. This would give me some comfort. - I like Sun, and am thankful for ZFS, and since I have to buy hardware anyway I'll look at what Sun offers. Perhaps I would even prefer to buy the Sun offering, all else being approximately equal. This would also give me some comfort. In that context, I haven't seen an answer, just a conclusion: - All else is not equal, so I give my money to some other hardware manufacturer, and get frustrated that Sun "won't let me" buy the parts I could use effectively and comfortably. -- Dan.
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