I've been looking down the road at a SAN replacements for a few months now. The big question from going from SMB (on the medium side) to SME for features is the jump in price I've been seeing. We've been looking at going from a HP P2000/P4000 environment to mid-tier solution (HUS110/VNX5300/StorServ7200/Nimble/Compellent/Tintri/ect)..We haven't picked a SAN solution yet but regardless of the the cost of the solutions is significantly more than what our current solutions have been costing. The two big issues we've been having with our existing solution has been increased performance demands and wasted space via thin-on-thin. To takes things down a different road I'm wondering how much of performance disadvantage I would be by picking up something like the Fusion ioDrive to handle the performance and just by enough extra disk to work-around the thin-on-thin issue, cost wise I'm seeing a significant cost savings. The environment is a mixed-workload (web, small oddball app servers, exchange, sql, oracle, file services, ect) environment with approximately 120 vm's running.
My question is has anyone gone done this road as an alternative to the traditional SME SAN solutions? How has the performance been? As far as the VARs saying their solution is so cheap I've talked to and gotten quotes from more than a few and using the cheaper SAN + PCIe Caching solution is running approximately 40% cheaper.