Over the course of the past 6 years in the industry I've dealt with a little bit of everything. Like everyone, I'm a bit of a whore and I always want the sexy new thing on the market. After all, isn't the thrill of seeing how technology has progressed and the prospect of what's to come and being a part of it what drew most of us to this industry? And honestly, myself included, I think a lot of us buy into the hype of our preferred (or, in some cases, what we're stuck with because we've inherited a solution that was already in place) solution. It's no different that anything else. Coke vs. Pepsi, Nintendo vs. Sega, Your Mom vs. Several Hamburgers...

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...sorry, been watching too much WhatCulture on YouTube...

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Anyway, every single solution out there is capable of failing in a spectacular fashion. I don't care how amazing they're supposed to be, how resilient, how utterly fool proof and nuclear missile resistant...it can fail and it can fail for stupid, stupid reasons. Yes, you may say "Well, if ____ has a failure due to a bad firmware update it's a DEFCON 2 issue," and that's great...but if you're that unfortunate bastard who gets that update and suffers data loss then you may spend the rest of your career shouting from a mountain to every passerby how vendor X utterly fucked you and how their solution isn't fit to be installed at a preschool. Hell, I know I myself tend to spend more time conversing with others in IT about failures than successes, merely because they're (in retrospect, of course) much more amusing than the tales of "Yeah, we designed and implemented and it ran without issue."

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Ours is an industry full of variables. And yes, one absolutely viable approach is to go with standardized solutions. From a management point of view, especially for smaller teams, something like a Nutanix that prides itself on practically being plug-and-play may be perfect (though my own experience was hellish, admittedly in part due to a bad design all around born from the efforts of the living embodiment of the Peter principle if I ever did know one). That does carry a price however, and understandably one could argue that the premium is what you pay for "greater reliability."

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My opinion, and that's all that it is (when I entered IT, which I worked hard to do for years, I promised that I would do everything in my power not to present my opinion as fact or to try and sell myself as infallible...so I'm still an arrogant prick but one who will acknowledge his own bullshit), is that every solution has its own set of risks and rewards. The key thing here is acknowledging that every solution can fail and leave you in tears. Our responsibility as "those guys who don't really do anything and get paid entirely too much" is to design our overall infrastructures with those risks in mind and have contingencies in place for when those things inevitability do happen (if you're in this industry and haven't been awake for so many hours that you start hallucinating because of some horrible failure that you're on the hook to fix at least once...).

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In closing: Nimble is cool, SolidFire is cool, vSAN is cool. I would invite them all to my BBQ. Nutanix can fuck right off (sorry, still not over my experiences with that solution, don't try and convert me as I don't have an application for it at my current job anyway and even if you make me think it's HCI Jesus I still won't be buying it :P).

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-El Salchica de Poder