The reason I would not use SAS in this case is your application does not require that level of performance and the cost in not justified. You can provision iSCSI and direct the cost saving into more important features like snapshot, dedup and replication. If you were to provision this solution with the DS3200 you would spend 10K and have none of those features. Performance will be very good but you will find the system is not even warmed up with that load. The SAS protocol can sustain high IO but thats not the what provisions IO, it's the number of disks and the RAID mode that defines your IO capability. I have benched 40K small IOPS over a single 1GB iSCSI cached target, thus it can do significant IO. Throughput is not as high but do you really need it. In the future you can cost effectively move to 10Gbe if you find the bandwidth to be insufficient, that would run 3+ times faster than the 3GB SAS limit which is not cost effective to upgrade.
Regards,
Mike
vExpert 2009
http://blog.laspina.ca/
vExpert 2009
