Update with VMWare:

The following benchmarks have been achieved with VMWare (preferable hypervisor). I still have some questions concerning the seeks/s that have been achieved. Current (network) setup is 1x 1 GB from storage to switch and 1x 1GB from host to switch.

Benchmark specs:

Code:
[root@localhost ~]#  dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/tmpMnt bs=1024 count=12000000
12000000+0 records in
12000000+0 records out
12288000000 bytes (12 GB) copied, 100.451 seconds, 122 MB/s
Code:
[root@localhost ~]# ./seeker /dev/sda
Seeker v2.0, 2007-01-15, http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html
Benchmarking /dev/sda [51200MB], wait 30 seconds..............................
Results: 386 seeks/second, 2.59 ms random access time
Code:
 
[root@localhost ~]# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   22744 MB in  2.00 seconds = 11395.36 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  276 MB in  3.01 seconds =  91.78 MB/sec