Well, K, it seems you have done your homework. You mentioned Liebert, I assume they were the facility suppliers, and they are definitely quality datacenter vendors. I wish you all the best.
Thanx for the info on the servers, that is a very good price-point. The one thing with custom-built equipment is the time involved into testing the parts and the whole, and in the appropriate burn-in. Most of the premium from "name" manufacturers supposedly reflects just that.
I have done some work with dense high-availability clusters, on Windows Datacenter, Solaris, and (a long time ago...) on Tandem computers. But these utilized pretty expensive nodes to begin with. RAICs I don't have experience with. Please, post your results when you have the time.
