Microsoft
morser,
I'd have to "See the math" in the space cost savings your claiming in archiving. Every time I've gone through the exercise with my clients the reality ends up being that they are using unrealistically costly SAN storage. 1TB drives are cheap when you just buy a couple of SAS/SATA disks (couple hundred dollars?), and thanks to the mentioned IO improvements they can handle the IOPs just fine. Resilience can be maintained with your system's local RAID or a DAG depending on your size .... both scenarios are usually much cheaper than anything you can put on a SAN (I've yet to see a decent SAN come in under 5 figures).
Honestly you could very likely put everything on local disks for under $1000 per server .... I'm not even sure you can buy an archive solution for that kind of money.
