We have a 750 terabyte environment spread across 6 clariion's and about 4 DMX's. We do storage tiering, the DMX is Platinum and has a higher cost associated with it because its always available and the Clariion is gold storage because you can expect some downtime for firmware upgrades and such. We have to be price competitive to meet our internal customer needs which is why we have the different storage arrays vs just 1 DMX now. I have asked the question to our team is it wiser to consolidate all these arrays to a single DMX4 because we could easily do storage tiering within the array and we don't have to pay maintenance on 10 different arrays. It seems though that disk purchases for DMX4 are more costly then lets say a Clariion array but DMX4's don't go down for maintenance like a clariion. Has anyone been through this in their environment that give me some direction on this issue?

Thanks,

Mike Palumbo