Hi Wout,

1. Architecture:
   Both approaches are perfectly valid, but my personal preference goes to a central approach. This allows you to more efficiently manage your compute on a central location. This will be more efficient and easier. You could also opt for running that in the cloud, your own cloud of choice or in dataminer.services as DaaS (DataMiner as a Service).
   The distributed architecture does have one advantage although, and if that advantage is a hard requirement, then you should choose distributed, otherwise I would go for central. The requirement is whether local monitoring and control is required when there is a major network outage. If the network is down, a central system won't be able to do anything, while a local system would still allow you to do something. Networks are very reliable these days, therefore I'm leaning towards a central architecture by default, but both approaches are valid and have their strengths.
2. Storage:
   For me that's a no-brainer. STaaS is superior. Setting up your own cluster will just be a lot of work and maintenance, and you'll never reach the efficiency, security and reliability of the cloud native STaaS solution.
   How does this work? Well, each DMA node needs to be able to access the storage, either your own database cluster or STaaS. In case of STaaS, it just makes a connection to that STaaS hosted in the Azure datacenter of your choice.
   You don't need to worry about data synchronization or consistency, that's all take care of for you. You only need to choose a datacenter location and optionally if you want geo-redundancy in another location.

Let us know if you would have any additional questions.

Bert