No, it probably means that they get their reliability at a different level, such as simply storing the data on a number of machines. Systems like glusterfs make this completely transparant.
Agreed, but I do know a few situations where it is being used, the 'stack' has been undressed to the minimum and tested to the hilt before deployment.
Still, I would not risk my company on it. I've been a big fan of their architecture from pretty much day 1, but so far they seem to be feature oriented and not stability oriented.
From the numbers he cited I got the impression that the drives they are using would fail 3+ times more often than enterprise drives (lower MTTF + speced at low temps). The cost of replacing the drives (even if they are 1/2 the price) would make the system uneconomical.
Also: because of their case design (non-hot-swappable) the cost of human replacement is higher too.
Thus they must have a low usage rate to have a low failure rate for their system to make business sense.
They're primarily write-only, only when a customer retrieves their data does stuff get read.
If they spin down the drives when the volume is not being accessed the mttf for a single drive goes up a lot, possibly beyond the point where it matters.
That, and the fact that the company seems to be struggling to get sales.
But you will have to manage the cycles for redundancy, lifetime and power savings. The software to do it must be really clever.