Anyone using Invista?

That's great that you're already familiar with the SSM modules. That will help you along quite a bit. As I'm sure you are aware, you would be in trouble if you were using the SAN or host-based splitter for RecoverPoint.
I forget if I mentioned earlier, but now that I have Invista running, I will be implementing RecoverPoint to replicate from Chicago to Las Vegas. I have been using Mirrorview/S to replicate between Chicago and the suburbs, so this will be my use of RecoverPoint.

In this other post (http://forums.emc.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=583693򎠍) I mention one of the main reasons why we chose to implement Invista. It was so we can create large pools of spindles (using Clariion MetaLUNS), and present that to Invista as 2TB Storage Elements. This allows me to quickly and easily create Virtual Volumes on these Storage Elements and know that they are spread across a large number of spindles on the back end. It makes provisioning the storage much easier and faster. I have had good success striping large numbers of spindles (60) for like-traffic types (Exchange data, SQL Data) for most of my servers. I reserve dedicated spindles for my highest performance servers to eliminate contention. But, most of my servers share spindles with other servers.

So, it's easier for me to provision that storage, but I realize that there is a risk that one server or LUN may pound on the spindles and take resources away from other servers. In this case, I want to be able to transparently migrate this data off of these shared spindles and put it onto dedicated spindles, for this I use an Invista Data Mobility job. Similar to a LUN Migration on a Clariion, but with Invista, I can move the data to a different array.

I also used Invista DM jobs to migrate data off of old arrays onto new ones for lease roll-off / trade-in. Once again, this could have been accomplished using other Clariion technology (Mirroview or SANCopy), but the hosts would have had downtime at the end of the migration to finalize the cut. With Invista, I can move the data wherever I want, whenever I want without any impact to the hosts.

Deciding if the cost of the product is worth it in your environment is a tricky thing to evaluate. I didn't do a cost/benefit analysis to compare the amount of time saved (mine and downtime) for the lease-rolloff. If you have a data migration coming up, work with your sales team to see if they can get you Invista for next to nothing to make it a no-brainer. I did not demo any other SAN virtulization products from other vendors. We are an all EMC shop and believe in the "one throat to choke" mantra.

Best of luck to you. If you have any other questions about my Invista experiences, please let me know what questions you have.