Many, many companies do want this, yes. Back in 2005-2006, I worked at MP3tunes and among other things I helped design the storage system. After testing a bunch of storage solutions (many of them high-end systems), we ended up rolling our own using Linux + MogileFS. This was scaled up to a couple hundred terabytes before I left, and even higher afterwards. Sometimes the off-the-shelf solutions simply don't work, especially at scale.
Pretty much, the amount of times we've had issues with new storage vendor arrays from a 3 letter company that starts with an E, and ends with a C, is a bit too much to count.
Firmware bugs that affect anything on a fabric, that affect how it distributes its cache slot locks on writes, issues with the entire array acting funny, which are blamed on either the server hardware or os itself until proven to be an issue with the array (this is far too common to be honest, yay for "support" contracts), etc....
Yes you get "support", and I use the term lightly, with big vendors, but you also have to take a machete through their support organization to get to someone that can help you with a problem. At times rolling your own solution will end up being both cheaper and less problematic. The old adage of "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" may soothe managers minds, but wait until you do end up buying those fancy pants high end arrays and find out how much snake oil turns out not to work on them.
If it can be an order of magnitude cheaper, why not? Enterprise storage has commanded a high premium for a long time and of course enterprises are storing more data than ever, not all of which needs the same performance characteristics. I welcome the shakeup in this space. The old days where you fretted endlessly over which data to preserve on expense SANs are fading behind us.
I think in general the premium goes to pay for support contracts and service as much as for the atoms and bits. Of course, it can always be argued whether those contracts and services are worth the premium, but many enterprise customers (Google being the obvious high-profile exception) seem to think so.
I'd also argue that you don't always need gold-plated storage. Think about user docs that are infrequently accessed , numerous, and must be retained for long periods. Deploying NetApp or EMC for that use case doesn't seem to make sense with options like this or OpenStack object storage.
If you mess up your data retention, though, you can get in big legal trouble. Sometimes you have to ask yourself whether you want to be the one who's liable for that.
Yes, because clearly what enterprise-level storage customers really want is to roll their own storage solutions using open source technology.