I was at the vmware forum the other day and netapp did a decent demo on their new offerings with deduping backups, sql and exchange for storage recovery. Also their app has a plugin for vcenter so you could manage the SAN from the vi console which I thought was a nice little bonus. Up to this point we have been building SANS via basic servers using either Datacore or Starwind software controllers. For other areas we also use NFS for less required storage like file sharing etc. My client just purchased 2 PS 6000's and I have another client who has an HP-SAN and running 20 VM's on it ran it to a crawl so they are moving into LeftHand after demoing it out. The hp san was managed and I never laid eyes on it other than running vmware benchmarks on it and it didn't fare too well, it was their entry level product. Starwind reports 3250 IOPS which is okay, but its memory usage masks a lot of that if you get a server with a lot of ram then the disk i/o is pretty good. Datacore does similar at a higher level (and price) but still less than a hardware based SAN of similar size. Im just learning about benchmarking SAN's myself (any tips appreciated). I run DRBD/IET in my datacenter because I can babysit it. I also have a Starwind server that does snapshot backups of all 4 of my esx servers and it does it pretty well.
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