We're a small company with about 250 users about 3 hosts and 25 guests with a mix of Terminal Server, exchange, SQL, IIS and the like. Currently we host all of our critical data on a Hitachi SMS 100 that is discontinued and ready for replacement. Many times users experience slow response times b/c the disks we have in the SAN just can't keep up when there is something intensive going on. I'd like to provide a faster experience for those users and at the same time have something that's not too difficult to manage.
I'm thinking either some Fusionio cards + a lefthand VSA + some SATA drives wtih SATA for stuff that's not critical or just make it easy and do a Nimble box. I wondered if someone would have some thoughts on either. Nimble does a lot of "magic" inside the box that I don't completely understand, but would be fairly easy to manage. Fusion would provide the fastest response but might be harder to decide what goes on SSD vs SATA and setting up all the VSA's to replicate etc. I think costs wouldn't be too far different. Does anyone have strong opinions about either?
