Question : Rehab Dell MD3000i or move to NetApp FAS2020 storage array?

Here's the deal.  
We need to decide to reconfigure our Dell MD 3000i's or upgrade to a pair of NetApp FAS2020.

We have two Dell MD3000i iSCSI storage arrays in use.  One in the US and one in Sweden.  These were not purchased to be part of a VMware enviroment but were purchased for simple iSCSi target storage using Dell servers running Windows Server.
We made a move to Vmware and built off of the MD3000i.  We now have at each site, 3 Vmware ESX Enterprise servers connected to the MD3000i.  We have around 15 VMs at one site and 8 at the other.
The MD3000i's have four different RAID groups and the performance is not so good.  The problem is that these were initially setup for simple iSCSI targets for only two physical servers and not VMware cluster performance.   Main problem:  In both locations, all the VMs are stored on a RAID 1 mirrored 750GB pair of SATA drives.  2nd problem, there are 5 different RAID groups splitting up the drives so over performance is not spread out on enough spindles as I understad it.  4th issue is that a RAID 5 set of hard drives is still being used as iSCSI target for two physical servers using Microsoft iSCSI software target.

So, we are investigating solutions.  Do we rebuild the MD3000i with fully loaded 750gb SATA drives making use of the 750's already in there or perhaps load them up with 15 - 300GB SAS 15K drives for really good performance.
OR, we are looking at a pair of Netapp FAS2020 loaded with 12 - 1TB hard drives.  It's disappoint with the Netapp's that you lose so many spindles to the system.  3 drives lost to each controller only leaves 6 spindles for performance.  Cache probably helps out a bit here though.

So, which way do we go?????  Netapp offers a lot of cool features like usable snapshots, replication between both facilities, CIFS shares to eliminate fileshare servers, however, it will cost us about 60K for both systems.
The Dell has none of those features but we can rebuild them on the low end with existing SATA drives for less than 2K or spend 10K and rehab both with new 15K SAS 300GB drives.

Money is not the primary goal, although it is important.  Rock solid technology is really more important here.

Thanks for help!

Answer : Rehab Dell MD3000i or move to NetApp FAS2020 storage array?

OR, we are looking at a pair of Netapp FAS2020 loaded with 12 - 1TB hard drives.  It's disappoint with the Netapp's that you lose so many spindles to the system.  3 drives lost to each controller only leaves 6 spindles for performance.  Cache probably helps out a bit here though.

-- You don't have to lose that many drives.  I would recommend a 2020 with a shelf (if possible).  Put SAS in the main unit and half populate the shelf with SATA.  My understanding is that you have two controllers in each, move the second controller's vol0 to the shelf and since you have active/active cluster that should be ok.

If the VMs are mostly application servers you will run de-deduplication and should get 40-75% deduplication on the VMs

So, which way do we go?????  Netapp offers a lot of cool features like usable snapshots, replication between both facilities, CIFS shares to eliminate fileshare servers, however, it will cost us about 60K for both systems.

--CIFS will cost less since you don't have to buy windows licenses and get over 50% de-duplcation or more on most office data

The Netapp is more solid and will do NFS, FC, iSCSI as your needs grow.  If you outgrow it you can make your head-unit a shelf off of a newer unit.

With NFS and VMware you will also have SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure for snapping your VMs (and not taking that much space to do so) If you snap on a Dell or most units you will need double the LUN requirements

With CIFS you can also do up to 255 snapshots giving insteneous restores for admins and users of previous data.  Make sure you backup via NDMP all the volumes and you'll have it on tape as well.