Storage Solutions

I am in the process of evaluating storage solutions for our environment. Beyond the marketing hype, I am looking for some real world experiences. The two storage solutions I am evaluating are Sun's StorEDGE A5200 and EMC Symetrix 3430 (with the possibility others down the road). As for Sun's solutions, they offer a couple of solutions. The StorEDGE A3500 is geared towards OLTP. It has hardware RAID and some cache (128mb per ctrl?). The A3500 is not suitable for a high-availability environment. The StorEDGE A5x000 does not have cache per se. It generates its performance from FC-AL and the new 10,000rpm drives (fibre to the disk). The A5x000 is the stepping stone for architecting a SAN environment. For the A5x000, the absence of cache in a heavy OLTP is a concern. As for EMC's solution, the Symetrix 3430 is suitable for our needs. EMC has the advantages of supporting multiple platforms, large cache for OLTP, huge disk farm in one box, and the ability to support various types of connectivity. Surely, this is not an exhaustive list for either vendor. If you are using either one of the above solutions, I (and iiug) would like to hear of your experiences. What were the realized gains? What would have you done differently? How did one stop shopping impact your decision? Your experiences would be appreciated. About my existing environment: Solaris 2.5.1 Ifmx 7.23 UC1 OLTP/DSS 3 E4000's, 3 SPARCStorage arrays (2 dual-homed, 1 stand alone). Steve Romankiw