Sure right after you show me where I said (1) A local copy is a bad idea... Sorry I did no mean to imply you think its a bad idea, but I do think you are selling it short, and I don't think you know enough about RAID to do that.
Oh so now you need to decentralize your centralized applications with redundant servers, this "cheap" option just got a lot more expensive because you're now doubling the quantity of big iron in the shop.
Virtual boxes are hardly 'big iron', neither are the physical boxes you need to se up clustering. A proper cluster will take advantage of existing hardware and they will act as mutual failovers for eachother.
I don't give a damn about your feeling, I'm talking about reality, and the reality is the more you centralize the more you're inviting disaster.
Im sorry you dont care about what I think, if thats the case and my opinion that I would rather have Rhonda with an engineering degree have control rather than Jane the secretary we can end this. Im less interested in talking to people who want to shout because they 'dont give a damn' what anyone else has to say if it does not line up with what you think...
You said it over and over and over, these are all from you:
So rather then properly architect a data storage solution you want to depend on the cheapest disk dell can send you?
Heres the rub, what if your desktop pukes itself?
But useless is a disk fails..
I hate to break it to you but most corporations today don't want you to save things to your local hard drive
I'm not selling Raid short and having implemented it I know quite a bit about it. One of the things I learned is that it's not foolproof, which of course nothing is, there's ALWAYS a lethal combination of drive loss that can make your data unrecoverable. The more complex and interwoven you setup your Raid of course the more bizarre and unlikely that lethal combination is, but it always exists. And of course the more you you make that lethal combination unlikely the more time and resources you're going to have to put into making and maintaining it, it's the nature of data protection.
I don't like virtual solutions to real problems. And if you're going to cluster small machines and want them to be useful then you need to buy plenty, which is just as pricey as big iron and now you're running into all of your "dell desktop" problems.
Think is fine, can prove is better, feelings are useless. No where have I said Jane the secretary should be put in charge, that more LIES from you. Might as well end it since all you can do is lie and insult.