Thanks for the insight. I have often wondered if there is a space between the companies operating very large data centers and those running small businesses. In distributed systems, my own experience is:

- the very large organizations will engineer whatever they must to meet their availability/performance targets - the mid-size orgs will use whatever they can from the big orgs to work in their area of competence - the small orgs are happy with the basics

There may well be a middle ground that I should explore more.

Thanks for the servethehome.com reference. I'll try to learn from his approach.