Hardware

Hardware :: RE: Re-using an old XServe RAID for ZFS

ACSA — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:10:36 GMT

Author: ACSA
Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 8:10 am (GMT -5)

bheading wrote:

Well, I would expect to have to hire a consultant to deal with integration issues, performance, scalability planning etc etc. I would not expect to have to hire a consultant to make something work. I've not encountered any other equipment from any other vendor that has outright failed from the get-go, and we have plenty of experience installing and provisioning services on Dell and Sun hardware. I also experience proper support from the vendor, and in Apple's case it just wasn't there (the advice on this forum was better!), and this seemed to become a lot worse after the XServe RAID went EOL.

But are you not having now a lot integration issues, you seem to not get it to work. Therefore Abstractrude suggests hire a consultant to this work. I've done a number of integrations of Xsan, in a multiple envoriments, and not just in a Mac shop.... Integration in using a Xsan with Active Directory can be a hassle, but doable and I have a number of Xsan's running is this kind of environment.

Hardware :: RE: Re-using an old XServe RAID for ZFS

bheading — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:06:44 GMT

Author: bheading
Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 6:06 am (GMT -5)

Well, I would expect to have to hire a consultant to deal with integration issues, performance, scalability planning etc etc. I would not expect to have to hire a consultant to make something work. I've not encountered any other equipment from any other vendor that has outright failed from the get-go, and we have plenty of experience installing and provisioning services on Dell and Sun hardware. I also experience proper support from the vendor, and in Apple's case it just wasn't there (the advice on this forum was better!), and this seemed to become a lot worse after the XServe RAID went EOL.

Hardware :: RE: Re-using an old XServe RAID for ZFS

abstractrude — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:42:44 GMT

Author: abstractrude
Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2010 4:42 pm (GMT -5)

It is extremely common to have consults integrate storage from many vendors including top tier EMC,NETAPP,DDN, etc. MY point is choose the right tools for the right job. as for your current project, have you thought about using a third party backup software. netvault smart disk comes to mind here.

Hardware :: RE: Re-using an old XServe RAID for ZFS

bheading — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:02:15 GMT

Author: bheading
Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2010 4:02 pm (GMT -5)

Hi abstract,

We spent a lot of time on the xserve raid/xsan and we could never get it right. It was in a production environment so we had to take it out and replace it.

The help we got from the folks here was good (I remember your being one of those who had suggestions) but it should not really be necessary to hire consultants or go on to forums to try to get something working when it is supposed to be backed up by support.

I suspect that the problem was that we aren't really a Mac shop. The main purpose of the SAN was as a CIFS/NFS file server. The problems we were having seemed to relate to issues hooking up with Active Directory. Apple blamed Microsoft, Microsoft blamed Apple, and we just couldn't get to the bottom of it. I am sure there are many stable XSan deployments, but I imagine the majority of them are in Mac shops.

We are hoping to reuse the XServe RAIDs as a backup destination. As such they don't need to be ultra-reliable, and I'm sure ZFS will be "good enough".