Proposed server purchase for GitLab.com
I&#x27;m a cranky old person now,  I think this is a crazy approach to take and I would be having a very challenging conversation with the engineer pitching this to me.<p>My underlying assumption is that this is a production service with customers depending on it.<p>1. Don&#x27;t fuck with networking. Do you have experience operating same or similar workloads on your super micro sdn? Will the CEO of your super micro VAR pickup his phone at 2AM when you call?<p>My advice: Get a quote from Arista.<p>2. Don&#x27;t fuck with storage.<p>32 file servers for 96TB? Same question as with networking re:ceph. What are your failure domains? How much does it cost to maintain the FTEs who can run this thing?<p>3. What&#x27;s the service SLA on the servers? Historically, supermicro VARs have been challenged with that.<p>If I were building this solution, I&#x27;d want to understand what the ROI of this science project is as compared to the current cloud solution and a converged offering like Cisco&#x2F;NetApp, HP&#x2F;3Par or something like Nutanix. You&#x27;re probably saving like 20-25% on hardware.<p>This sounds to me like pinching pennies on procurement and picking up tens of dollars of cost on the labor side. If you&#x27;re accustomed to SLAs from AWS, this will be a rude awakening.