I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)
I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.
AMA.
I normally don’t get into storage at that level – most of the storage solutions I use are enterprise-grade disk from Hitachi/Dell/EMC/IBM, etc. I’ve looked at Gluster, but never really tried implementing it. Ceph seems powerful, but more complicated than I’m willing to get into for my personal projects.
Once you cross a couple terabytes, I start moving everything to tape or (more recently) cloud storage where the day-to-day management is someone else’s problem.