There are two major pitfalls to crowd-sourced consulting such as this.
1) Contributors have not been vetted - Some responses are based on real world experience, and some is conjecture from arm-chair quarterbacks. (A simple example would be that nobody has mentioned with any of the SuperMicro 2U Twins that you have to be cautious about the PDU models and outlet locations of 0U PDU's to not block node service/replacement in the rack)
2) There are multiple ways to skin a cat - There are many viable solutions in this thread, but you can't simply take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and piece together a new platform that "just works." -- Better to go with a know working solution than a little of this and a little of that. Multiple drivers tend to be less effective.
I am the owner of a bespoke Infrastructure as a Service provider that delivers solutions to sites of similar metrics, and speak with plenty of real-world experience.
Larger Providers - We find a lot of clients move away from AWS, Softlayer, Rackspace, et al. as the larger providers aren't nearly as interested in working with the less-than-standard configurations. They want highly-repeatable business, not one-off solutions.
I'd love to talk in more depth with you about how we can deliver exactly what you need based on years of experience in delivering highly customized solutions. We'll save you money and headache.
HN crowdsourcing is a pretty reasonable strategy for entities that cannot reliably identify & hire 1+ rockstar employee(s) and/or VARs to cover the compute, networking, storage, electrical, environmental, etc. If you can rationally evaluate the HN comments you should get pretty close to the best, cutting-edge advice. Whereas when you are small and you listen to 1 or 2 VARs and/or 1-2 internal employees you can expect, on average, to get average advice. Or advice that was excellent 2-3 years ago but is now out-of-date due to HW/SW progress that the employee/VAR is unaware of.
Cutting-edge and availability aren't really always best friends. For example cutting edge routing and switching (the latest products, fabric, SDN's, MC-LAG, etc) are notorious for failures and outages.
Average is not the appropriate word, however I'll use your word. I'd rather have, and so would every enterprise out there, rather have average advice based on tried and true solutions that costs 10% more with 99.99 to 99.999% availability than cutting edge, saved 10-20% with 99.8% availability. The downtime alone can (and does) kill reputations of sites like GitLab.com (and others).
1) Contributors have not been vetted - Some responses are based on real world experience, and some is conjecture from arm-chair quarterbacks. (A simple example would be that nobody has mentioned with any of the SuperMicro 2U Twins that you have to be cautious about the PDU models and outlet locations of 0U PDU's to not block node service/replacement in the rack)
2) There are multiple ways to skin a cat - There are many viable solutions in this thread, but you can't simply take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and piece together a new platform that "just works." -- Better to go with a know working solution than a little of this and a little of that. Multiple drivers tend to be less effective.
I am the owner of a bespoke Infrastructure as a Service provider that delivers solutions to sites of similar metrics, and speak with plenty of real-world experience.
Larger Providers - We find a lot of clients move away from AWS, Softlayer, Rackspace, et al. as the larger providers aren't nearly as interested in working with the less-than-standard configurations. They want highly-repeatable business, not one-off solutions.
I'd love to talk in more depth with you about how we can deliver exactly what you need based on years of experience in delivering highly customized solutions. We'll save you money and headache.