I used to work in pre-sales tech support for a security distributor.
One of my tasks was working out how much storage a CCTV system would need based on number of cameras, type of camera, frame rate on idle, frame rate on alarm, number of days archive etc.
I'd then recommend the number of servers needed and the amount and type of storage.
One job we had people tendering for was a large town in Berkshire that hosted a castle and large public school.
The system involved over 100 cameras in total, and over 100tb of storage, made up of 10tb of very fast storage for live recordings and 90tb for archives.
For reasons I'll never understand, the guy that won the tender ran a mobile phone shop, he didn't have an account with us and was buying everything on credit card.
He also had no idea what he was doing, so he was going to pay £1000 a day for my time and a colleague.
I sent him a detailed list of the server and stoarge requirements, with a recommended set up configuration, he assured us he would buy the gear and set up the arrays, they would be ready for us when we arrived on site to do the config.
When we got there he'd bought a couple of very dodgy looking Chinese servers running 3-year out of date Xeons, not the spec I suggested, about half the RAM I suggested, and instead of the SAN I told him to buy, he'd bought a 5U SATA connected box holding 64 x 2TB SATA drives configured as a single RAID 5 array, to do the live recording and archive.
We told him it wasn't going to work, and it failed about 6 hours after we turned it on, because two of the drives he'd bought off eBay died and the system couldn't cope with recording all those cameras whilst it rebuilt the array.
The customer's justification was the kit I recommended would have cost around £60k, his box of hard drives and chinese servers cost less than £10k. The point that my system would work and his didn't seemed to get lost somewhere.
My manager pulled us out that afternoon and demanded the council appointed a different company.
The last I heard the customer filed for bankruptcy as he couldn't cover the credit card debt and the camera manufacturer appointed one of their approved installers to fix the mess...