Yep, we went JBOD and saw the performance win as expected :)
> dying in all of the weird and wonderful ways that they do
It's only been a few months, but there have been plenty of great surprises thrown out by those disks. Both in the ways that they've failed and how the kernel has handled those failures!
Absolutely, Varnish with malloc has (and still) served us well when the working set fits in RAM - that was why we started with Varnish. We still use it in front of our web servers and will for the foreseeable future!
> dying in all of the weird and wonderful ways that they do
It's only been a few months, but there have been plenty of great surprises thrown out by those disks. Both in the ways that they've failed and how the kernel has handled those failures!