[Tad Sherrill]

It’s good advice to have experts come in and tune your current system and solve performance issues… Always the first option since rip and replace or even adding a new SAN can cost you a lot in both in capital and in man hours…

I work in the financial industry and have had similar pressure for system performance and consistency with a Compellent. You can make a Compellent your central SAN but, like any SAN you buy, you will have to keep a close eye on IOPS (etc) to keep ahead of the curve. If your budget makes it difficult to maintain a good performance buffer (including spikes) then I would say keep your SAN’s (whatever brand) separate.

Compellent is specifically built to let all connections use all disks and is optimized for it. As long as you keep enough spindles going and allocate your data migration appropriately, you will get the performance you need. You can tell the compellent that all video systems are to be kept on high speed disks longer (or permanently) than backoffice an IT systems.

Stressing again – if performance is a key business driver and you still want to share resources make sure you have the budget and control to service the money makers.