As NateNate60 mentioned: USB Flash. I second this as a cost effective alternative to anything else. Corsair Survivor, Sandisk Exteme Pro and Kingston DataTraveler Flash drives to 256GB are cheaper than anything else and just as reliable.
Should you want to go the SSD route, the Corsair MX500 drives purchased with any external esata or usb chassis is the most reliable option for the price.
Yeah, we dumped Cisco for Aruba two years ago. Completely replaced the entire company core network infra. No major complaints.
On the Enterprise side of things, I was a huge VCE fan pre-Dell days. Only thing close to that now is Pure Flashstack, which isn’t bad, just pricey. I’m just not a Dell fan, Michael Dell is a fuck-whit.
Comparing my experience with Cisco B and C Class, HPE DL and Dell PE server experience over the past 20 years:
Cisco: Expensive, Good support/service during lifetime of product, excellent management tools w/o buying additional lics, reliable, but eosl/eol is short and poorly supportable after.
DELL: Just retired some 30 of their servers and storage. No regrets. Expensive, horrible support, licensing is a nightmare, but e360 and online tools were better than others. EOL/EOSL support is okay for a max of 2 yrs afterwards.
HPE: Just deployed 20 DL380G10+, Cheaper than other 2, licensing is a pita, support is meh, but InfoSight and support costs are cheap and there’s good support past eol/eosl.
I’ve done the whole white box thing like SuperMicro a number of times and while it is cheaper upfront, it’s a headache over time.
The easiest way imo to “use Linux” is to start by running it as a virtual machine using virtualbox or free VMWare Workstation (free for one VM). That way, you can find what is useful or not for you in your Profession and go from there.
Dad here, I also do most of the cooking for my family and thus and doing Thanksgiving too. Wife and kids are definitely helping where I ask them though: From chopping to dishes, it all adds up and saves time.