I've taken this from where I replied to a comment on my blog:
Support
4 hour on site response offered from vendors is not good enough for us and to improve on that is expensive. With using more standard components we are able to be on site at either our primary or secondary datacenter within 30 minutes with spare parts in hand if required.
Choosing one vendor as an example, the support we've received from HP has been atrocious - they've caused more outages than they've be able to fix. The engineers they send to smaller organisations are generally relatively incompetent and they have certainly shown that they don't care about your uptime.
Proprietary storage systems offered by HP, DELL and EMC are not only expensive to purchase and license but they're very time consuming to manage as they're essentially a 'snowflake' in your infrastructure. It's hard to make them integrate with modern automation tools such as Puppet and CI requirements and they all use their own management tools that are specific to the vendor or range of product - usually this involves having a Windows VM running Java or some equally frustrating technology to manage the system. Performing updates on proprietary systems can often be painful as hardware vendors generally are not very good at designing software.
It's very hard to outsource quality and it comes at a large cost.
You have hit the nail on the head for why most "enterprise" gear is basically overpriced junk. That doesn't mean there isn't quality hardware out there, just that you have to be more selective. AKA do your own research and don't be dazed by the feature lists. Some of those features shouldn't actually be used.
I personally tend to like the KISS arrays that don't have dedupe/replication/etc built in, and are web manageable. The extra bonus is that there are a metric boatload of tier 2 array vendors (imation's nexan for example) that provide rock solid hardware for a small fraction of the prices of EMC/etc. Its quite possible to get native capacity for less than a company like EMC charges for deduped capacity (aka 100TB from a tier two company can cost less than the 10TB deduped to 100TB from EMC). Raw RAID is pretty simple/understood in comparison to deduped solutions, and I think that has a significant affect on reliability. AKA more features, more latent bugs...
Finally, get a bunch of demo units, and if the configuration UI is a mess of esoteric proprietary command line junk, or it is only configurable with a 32-bit java app that won't run on a 64-bit windows (yah I've seen that) then send the unit back. Be clear about why it won't work for you. The only way to convince these companies to behave is to show them lost sales.
Support
4 hour on site response offered from vendors is not good enough for us and to improve on that is expensive. With using more standard components we are able to be on site at either our primary or secondary datacenter within 30 minutes with spare parts in hand if required.
Choosing one vendor as an example, the support we've received from HP has been atrocious - they've caused more outages than they've be able to fix. The engineers they send to smaller organisations are generally relatively incompetent and they have certainly shown that they don't care about your uptime.
Proprietary storage systems offered by HP, DELL and EMC are not only expensive to purchase and license but they're very time consuming to manage as they're essentially a 'snowflake' in your infrastructure. It's hard to make them integrate with modern automation tools such as Puppet and CI requirements and they all use their own management tools that are specific to the vendor or range of product - usually this involves having a Windows VM running Java or some equally frustrating technology to manage the system. Performing updates on proprietary systems can often be painful as hardware vendors generally are not very good at designing software.
It's very hard to outsource quality and it comes at a large cost.