Thanks for the clarification. That the PODs were on rails was never made clear to me. Still, I count that as "physically removing a 4u rackmount storage pod." Those suckers cannot be light. 10 seconds sounds rather fast. I don't imagine you could do it that fast for any of the upper pods.
We somewhat affectionately dubbed them "mullets" as in business in the front, party in the rear.
They make 4U devices as well. Cost was about $1000. We added LSI Megaraid 9280 controllers, about another $1500 and ran min-SAS back to a controller node responsible for 4 JBODs.
It's a different trade-off. The Supermicro boxes use drive trays, so swapping a hard drive requires a datacenter tech to handle the tray mounting and unmounting. The PODs just drop drives right in. They've traded off tray mounting work for chassis sliding.
While I don't recommend them outright, we settled on 3U boxes from SuperMicro. http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/3u/837/sc837e26-r...
We somewhat affectionately dubbed them "mullets" as in business in the front, party in the rear.
They make 4U devices as well. Cost was about $1000. We added LSI Megaraid 9280 controllers, about another $1500 and ran min-SAS back to a controller node responsible for 4 JBODs.