Why did Homestead.com choose to buy EMC at this point? The main reason is that Network Appliance's next generation is not yet ready, so the ability
to
scale based on current products was not optimal for us.
What do you mean by this? Not enough total storage? Just buy a second Netapp, since they are as easy as you note to set up and administer, this shouldn't be prohibitive. Plus, if you are simply thinking about raw storage capacity, this won't help you; the Celerra doesn't have the CPU to support an infinite amount of disk, and you'll have to get another one just like you would have a Netapp.
Also, we wanted a RAID 1+ solution - WAFL is RAID 4 (and very good, just not as tolerant of disk failures).
Hmm. Maybe I'm confused, but isn't RAID 1+0 *less* tolerant of disk failures, not more? Both can tolerate a single disk failure. RAID 1+0 has essentially twice as many disks, so the chance of a single disk failure is twice as high. Once that happens, the chance of a second disk failure in the same array is about the same was the Netapp. (That's assuming one RAID group).
And what's the price difference for a Celerra, and a Symmetrix, with *3 times* as much disk as you need for the Netapp model? Can't you buy 2 Netapps for that price?
Bruce