What would be the best price/performance solution for their active data?

We have been engaged by a research hospital to help upgrade their Isilon installation. They currently have 12 previous generation Isilon nodes with 200TB of capacity and run on a 1Gbps network. They currently have 6 IIlumina Hi-Seq Sequencers and an HPC cluster to process data.

They would like to expand Isilon to 2PB of active data and 1PB of archive data. They use a third party data and metadata management service (IRODs) to stage data for analysis. The Isilon cluster is mainly used for analysis work with the HPC cluster. The customer has a limited budget.

What would be the best price/performance solution for their active data?
A . 14 X-Series nodes with no SSD drives and 96GB of RAM
B . 17 X-Series nodes with SSD drives and 48GB of RAM
C . 14 NL-Series nodes with 24GB of RAM
D . 12 X-Series nodes with no SSD drives and 24GB of RAM

Answer: A