For development purposes I was looking for a “cheap” upgrade over our aging Apple XServeRAID fiber channel arrays. These served us well, if one excludes the lack of LUN masking in the later firmware versions, but we have consistently outgrown their native capacity. Besides Apple (and its dismal enterprise support) has stopped selling them so we have been left with no choice but to look elsewhere.
The basic requirements are:
- Fiber Channel or iSCSI target support to support database workloads
- Ability to carve LUNs out of a pool that is large enough (at least 20 TB of raw storage)
- Ability to clone volumes
- Ability to take snapshots within seconds
There are a few candidates that fullfil this bill: Equallogic, Sun Thumper, 3PAR, Compellent, the XServe replacement from Promise coupled with LVM, various Overland devices.
The general hotness of ZFS and the “Try-n-buy” program from Sun made it acceptable to give their hardware and software a try. After all Solaris is not that different from linux (or should I say commute both terms), the hardware is dirt cheap (you can’t get much cheaper) and Sun’s expertise with hardware systems based on Opterons has been proven in-house on their wonderful SunFire x4600.
To make a long story short, the iSCSI target daemon on Solaris 10 is not stable enough for production use. We were plagued with numerous core dumps, causing the iSCSI setup to flickr and initiators to moderately appreciate the frequent interrupts. Setting up OpenSolaris seemed to help a bit but our trust in the stability of the code had suffered an irremediable blow (well, not quite irremediable, but at least for another year or so).
Pressed for time I have decided to cut our losses short and to spend more money to get a 48 TB 3PAR E200, vastly more expensive per TB but also known to work. I really wished the Thumper trial had been successful; I believe in OpenSolaris, what I’ve seen of ZFS makes me green with envy (compared to ext3 + LVM) but I simply cannot justify downtime and/or the hiring of a Solaris core code guru to troubleshoot this mess.
Time for a sales pitch here. You can also look at <a href=”http://dnfstorage.com/products.asp/section/Product~Categories/category/Apple~Storage~Solutions”"DNF’s StorMacX” to go on top of your Xserve. This will give you everything you need for snaps, and cloning. Or look at StoneFly IP SANs too. Not as well known, but <a href=”www.stonefly.com/solutions” “StoneFly SANs” are stable and have been around for a while.
Thanks for you post on Thumper. We are pretty intrigued at my company to see how it plays out, but we have been busy working on some other projects. Good luck on your SAN hunt. How do you like the Tiger initiator?
I’m sorry to hear your experience with Solaris 10 wasn’t up to par, we’re aware the current iSCSI implementation has some issues and we’re working very hard to fix it. In fact, we’ve got both a better much iSCSI daemon in OpenSolaris today, and we’re working on placing that into a Solaris 10 update. I’d very much like to hear about how exactly you were trying to use iSCSI so we can ensure we can compete for your business in the future, and deliver a better experience for everyone. If you’re willing, please contact me at dan (dot) roberts (at) sun (dot) com as I’d love to hook you up with the right folks.
Dan Roberts
Director of Solaris & OpenSolaris Product Management