Not sure I'd go so far as to call it a "presentation" but we went with HDS for servers and storage as Scott mentioned.

My reasoning is that we're used to shared storage, and done correctly it's a godsend vs. the terrible burden that many people make it out to be.

We're a VMware shop and we have about 75 VM's (and increasing) and about 20TB of data (and increasing).

I looked at a lot of options.

Local storage is, to me, not an option at this scale, and I say that simply because with a single 10TB (and growing) file server on a single box you're going to have a bad day if that box fails, and it makes updates such as firmware and ESXi updates on the box something which have to be planned for.

Replicated local storage is something that I considered as we have experience of HP StoreVirtual, albeit the physical version vs. the virtual appliance.

In the end I ruled it out because it introduces more complexity than I wanted, and once you're into three hosts and 35-40TB usable and you want decent IOPS you end up buying an insane amount of RAW capacity.

I did a lot of research and came to the conclusion that for us, I needed to put to one side every "geek" instinct that I had and look at what we needed - which was dumb, deathly reliable block storage.

I'd seen HDS mentioned a fair bit on Spiceworks so spoke to John773 (@John-Nicholson) about them and got a ton of useful advice and found HDS the most helpful, easiest to deal with, and least slimy of all the vendors I'd been speaking to.

We settled on a HUS110 with a couple of tiers of disks combined into a single dynamic pool, so it just presents as 36TB (or so) of usable storage which we carve into LUNs and the hot/cold data automatically tiers between the fast and slow disk.

Connectivity is direct attached FC so there are no switches, the hosts just connect directly into the controllers so it's really being used as a high end DAS array rather than a true SAN (though at that point I think most people would use the term "SAN" even if semantically it is incorrect).

The HUS is 99.999% uptime rated - the environment it's in is not, so the HUS is not the thing I should be worrying about in terms of reliability.

There endeth the presentation.

At the time of going the HUS route the HCI solutions were limited.

We looked at a couple of the big names, pricing was insane though I'd happily have a rack of either if money wasn't a factor in any of the lifecycle beyond just the initial purchase price.

That left a whole bunch of "roll your own" solutions, Scale at the time didn't seem to scale plus we're comfortable on ESXi, could we change? Yes of course, but then you're migrating to a hypervisor with a more limited support ecosystem however rock solid that hypervisor may be so I'm not sure what we actually gain there?

Starwind and other solutions are a bit too roll-your-own as was, I felt, StoreVirtual, in that if it all went wrong you're possibly stuck between the hardware vendor, the switch vendor, the OS vendor, the HCI stack vendor and so on which is great when you've saved a few $$$ but not so good when your business is down and nobody wants to own the issue.

Scale, Simplivity, Nutanix etc. are (or were when we purchased, maybe it's changed) all designed on the principle you scale compute and storage linearly and we don't which means that if/when I needed to add another TB of capacity I'd either be bolting on NAS and stuff to a HCI solution, or I'd be buying additional nodes giving me compute and storage and licensing costs when really all I needed was a disk tray and a couple of drives which I can do with the HDS.

In short it's simple and it's reliable and from the numbers at the time I know we didn't pay massively more than anything I could have rolled ourselves and ended up with a lot more complexity for very little gain.

That said, when the replacement time comes I suspect the HCI and VSA options will have matured a lot from where they were 2 years ago so there will be some more interesting options on the table - but I see that as being more in terms of things like stretching clusters than chasing 9's from a pile of kit all sitting in the same rack.