One of the most common similar occurrence I meet regularly is people grossly underestimating how many bytes per second you can really get from basic hardware such as hard drives, gigabit ethernet cards, etc. People often still remember that in 1998 the fastest FC 10k rpm drives hardly topped 12 MB/s, and that you needed an 8 CPU Origin2000 to push 80 MB/s through a GigE link (given that you had a terrific RAID array at both ends).
Nowadays, even the most basic PC can saturate a GigE link (115 MB/s), and the slowest hard drives go 100 MB/s. Any SSD sustains several thousands IOPS, and so on.
One of the most unfortunate result is that people often buy hugely powerful hardware when very basic stuff would have done the job just fine. How many people have I seen running puny workloads on 100k bucks 3Par or EMC arrays, where a handful of SSDs in a server would have done as well or better? Pulling 40Gb fibre across the room when cat 6 cable would have sufficed?
Nowadays, even the most basic PC can saturate a GigE link (115 MB/s), and the slowest hard drives go 100 MB/s. Any SSD sustains several thousands IOPS, and so on.
One of the most unfortunate result is that people often buy hugely powerful hardware when very basic stuff would have done the job just fine. How many people have I seen running puny workloads on 100k bucks 3Par or EMC arrays, where a handful of SSDs in a server would have done as well or better? Pulling 40Gb fibre across the room when cat 6 cable would have sufficed?