Editing Storage (section)

=== Vendor Array ===
Not for the faint hearted, a full on vendor array is rare in the wild, but they are out there! Commonly procured from eBay, they are also occasionally provided by vendors for PoCs or businesses throwing out their old kit.

If you are lucky enough to get your hands on one of these, and have the space to rack it where the noise won't drive you mad, then you can look forward to personal service from your account manager at the power company as money starts leeching from your account to theirs in huge quantities! A typical enterprise array will drain around 200-300w per shelf, and another 300-600w for the head units! It's no wonder we keep having to upgrade power and cooling capacity to data centres!

The biggest benefits are:
* Very similar to a real enterprise environment, so excellent for learning
* Devices are usually dual controller, so for 24/7 labs, very good uptime can be maintained
* Usually a rich feature set and broad set of [[Storage#Data Services|data services]]

Biggest drawbacks are:
* Noise
* Vibration (can be as annoying as noise if you have it sitting in the loft or similar)
* Power consumption (ouch!)
* May even require specific power connections or three phase power, and could exceed your breaker limits on your consumer unit
* Cost of spares if anything fails
* Usually requires that you have an actual rack to house it in
* Usually requires that it is run 24/7 - enterprise arrays don't often take kindly to being turned off, especially if they are a bit older

Using a real vendor array is usually not for the faint hearted, but there are plenty of people out there using them today! Ideally if you have managed to get hold of some real vendor enterprise storage to run in your homelab, you would be best off buying a big box of chocolates for your boss or DC manager, and asking if your company can colo it for you for free in a comms room or data centre! If not, you better hope you have a well ventilated basement or garage with space for a rack!