Friday, May 15, 2009
Mass mountain SAN arrays
Mass mountain SAN arrays
We purchased a Mass mountain, as opposed to our normal fair for our new backup to disk product.
The idea was separate low cost hardware with a lot of space, as it was not primary data the performance was not a huge concern. We have run across some issues that put it out of the running for A) primary storage B) This project
First the good:
Mass Mountain uses openE, this allows for a very open and feature rich product. You are able to publish via FC, ISCSI and NAS (all at the same time) along with the ability to bridge other storage devices and publish them out. (For example could connect it to another FC array and publish a volume via ISCSI). Also unlike some others you can put different disk and different RAID all on the same array (For example we wanted a 2 disk SAS raid mirror ISCSI and the other 14 disks raid 50 (with 2 global spares) published NAS in several logical volumes)
As such it is a very very flexible piece of hardware with many options
The bad:
1) No built in way to expand beyond the chassis (Other then using the RAID card to expand the RAID set)
2) Interface non intuitive and often hard to find things
3) Publishing new targets and new volumes via ISCSI restarts the ISCSI service for all volumes (this is a big one!)
4) Max logical volume with replication is 4TB (Deal breaker for our project as it needs a very large single volume)
5) We have had our volumes just “Stop” being published. All servers dropped connection to their ISCSI volumes (this included 2 different RAID containers) The only resolution was to REBOOT the array! No RCA on it.
6) To do MPIO required actually having the NICS on both the SAN and the Servers be in different subnets with the MSISCSI initiator. Which is silly ISCSI is designed to be able for the SAN to be able to control logins and balance between interfaces without having to manually set subnets so they CANT communicate with the other one
All said and done the bads outweigh the goods we have no confidence in the stability and have some deal breaker limitations on size of volumes
As such we have elected to move back to our normally arrays at a significantly higher price for the stability and features
We purchased a Mass mountain, as opposed to our normal fair for our new backup to disk product.
The idea was separate low cost hardware with a lot of space, as it was not primary data the performance was not a huge concern. We have run across some issues that put it out of the running for A) primary storage B) This project
First the good:
Mass Mountain uses openE, this allows for a very open and feature rich product. You are able to publish via FC, ISCSI and NAS (all at the same time) along with the ability to bridge other storage devices and publish them out. (For example could connect it to another FC array and publish a volume via ISCSI). Also unlike some others you can put different disk and different RAID all on the same array (For example we wanted a 2 disk SAS raid mirror ISCSI and the other 14 disks raid 50 (with 2 global spares) published NAS in several logical volumes)
As such it is a very very flexible piece of hardware with many options
The bad:
1) No built in way to expand beyond the chassis (Other then using the RAID card to expand the RAID set)
2) Interface non intuitive and often hard to find things
3) Publishing new targets and new volumes via ISCSI restarts the ISCSI service for all volumes (this is a big one!)
4) Max logical volume with replication is 4TB (Deal breaker for our project as it needs a very large single volume)
5) We have had our volumes just “Stop” being published. All servers dropped connection to their ISCSI volumes (this included 2 different RAID containers) The only resolution was to REBOOT the array! No RCA on it.
6) To do MPIO required actually having the NICS on both the SAN and the Servers be in different subnets with the MSISCSI initiator. Which is silly ISCSI is designed to be able for the SAN to be able to control logins and balance between interfaces without having to manually set subnets so they CANT communicate with the other one
All said and done the bads outweigh the goods we have no confidence in the stability and have some deal breaker limitations on size of volumes
As such we have elected to move back to our normally arrays at a significantly higher price for the stability and features
Labels: FC, ISCSI, MassMountain, NAS, SAN
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