I saw a demo of this the other day from a Dell rep. He claimed that Compellant's system architect said that performance tuning these tiered SANs is "as easy as clicking checkboxes and then going to drink beer".

I had one question for the Dell rep, and he did not have an answer for me since he was not a SQL Server guy. I asked him how tools that try to use heuristics to automatically discover bottlenecks, like the PALTools[/url] on Codeplex, could still work in this environment. Obviously, PALTools could still show you non-Disk bottlenecks (CPU, Memory), but I am trying to wrap my mind around how it would report on disk bottlenecks.

I am still a "Junior DBA" (really, I am a software developer who was asked to be the performance guru on our SQL Servers), so I apologize if this question is naive or stupid.

The geek in me finds this tiered data storage thing fascinating.