We recently aquired 3 new health clinics that were in a group. We had 10 locations ourselves so now it brings us 13. They had their own EHR system (custom built by in house programmer) on a compellent SAN along with 8-10 virtual servers Vcenter 5. We have 6 virtual servers ourselves with Vcenter 5 and look to roll out Sharepoint very soon along with many other new servers as well just waiting on which SAN to choose. We are also wanting to slowly roll out VDI (VMWare version) as well. Currently have 300 employees which all would need persistent desktop as our main EHR uses citrix client to connect to private cloud Nextgen EHR that has to be hard coded to a user so therefore persistent desktops. Remote replication is also desired. Hub A has different data than Hub B so remote replication is not one way for the time being, eventually could migrate that way.
We are currently looking to roll out small say 30-40 desktops and test and run for a bit and then slowly migrate all users to VDI as long as SAN scales out ok. We are currently getting pricing from:
Fujitsu, Compellent, and Nimble.
After researching more I came across Nexgen and Pure Storage as well. My thoughts are that the above three are great however Nexgen and Pure storage would scale out immediately IOPS/latency wise however they are a bit pricier from early reviews and they dont natively carry replication. I will get a price from Nexgen and Pure very soon. I am a bit worried about storage size as well with Nexgen and Pure but they both reduce/compress/data dedupe so maybe they could contain VDI (300x25GB = 8TB) and current virtual servers (6TB).
Does anyone here have or use Nexgen or Pure? Fujitsu and Compellent are old models of SAN storage and I really like the way Nexgen and Pure works from a theory standpoint, forget tiering-more management. I am just not sure how much I trust new players so was looking for advice from those who have Nexgen or Pure or are more knowledgable about SANS than I am. We are a not-for-profit so cost is definitely a consideration however I dont expect everything for nothing and am willing to spend the dough as long as it I dont have to keep going to the trough.