Small Business Build-Out Storage

I've been looking at the smaller build-out storage options for a project I'm doing.  I've never seen such public bitchiness between the tech marketing teams as in this market.

The future for this company is a converged architecture - app infrastructure as an appliance.  VNE and vBlock are fine ideas but hetrogeneous support up and down, not specific storage or app servers, is likely to win the most market.

With that in mind, here are the requirements.

This project requires something that can get going quickly without running out of steam as they grow.  Like many infastructures these days, there is no need for anything that scales massively for a single query set.  But they don't want to roll their own solution entirely at the app level either. Storage sizing is estimated around 4-6Gb for main tables, 20GB for other data.  That means something with a 50GB-100GB capacity.

• Market leader is important - resale value, ability to purchase used, market availability of expertise, etc.
• Cloud-storage tiering for off-site and scale-out.
• Really easy to use management tools - no dedicated storage staffing, no classes.
• Really tight virtualization integration - back-up/DR/management - no science projects.
• Total cost is important but CapX better than people as long as disc upgrades don't cost arm + leg (do any of these support BYOD.)
• Open standards with published HCLs for hosts + host adapters.

This leads to HP P2000 G3 (as of today with the new VMware hooks), NetApp FAS2020, EMC VNXe 3300. There are a few startup players but the advantages aren't that substantial vs. the established players.

EMC has the lead on converged solutions but the vBlock 0 doesn't use the VNXe. The NetApp and HP solutions are more like cookbooks/pro-serve offerings rather than shrink wrapped products.  Cisco UCS + Nexus linking to VNXe 3300 seems to have almost all the support we'd need without the lockin of a single provider.

(An aside - I don't get all the FUD being thrown out because EMC has multiple product lines....It's like getting upset with Sony because their TV's don't play playstation games or IBM because their mainframes don't run the same apps as their x86 servers.  They are a big company and I'm sure that just the VNXe revenue alone would be a top-10 storage company on it's own....)

The solution is seems to be VNXe - clear support, cloud tiering available today, transparent and reasonable pricing (it's a distribution product), extensive VMware support, unified storage support. Now if it only had DataDomains' dedupe magic built in....and Veeam's backup...