Here are some things I'm considering, please let me know your opinions on these:

1. Everything I've read on clustering SQL Server or MySQL has really turned me off. It seems like it's not too hard to setup failover OR scalability, but combining fail-over and scalability gets way more complex, not to mention expensive.

2. It seems like a SAN puts all the complexity in one place and then everything else can be dumb.

3. I've never had any data corruption issues on quality networks. If a table does become corrupt Abri makes a great recovery tool.

4. I've always read/heard that a SQL server for a small user base is actually slower than a file based .DBC

5. A SAN, once in place, is very easy to scale up or out.

6. To scale out the web server side, just add cheap 1u web servers.


Thanks,
Brandon