Hi Alex,
About the storage- what matters most to SAN performance, if it is HDD based, is the number of disks underlying each LUN.
1. How many disks are in each LUN?
2. We typically place one tile per LUN. How did you distribute your tiles across LUNs?
VMmark has a number of 8 tile published results: VMware VMmark I recommend looking at the hardware used in these results to get an idea of what kind of hardware is needed for an 8 tile result.
Thanks,
Rebecca