Promise Raid or not to Promise Raid?

[ChrisWood]

Hi Folks,

I'm new to this forum and this is my first post so lets make it a good one ;o)

I am looking to implement a new XSAN 2 solution but am slightly dismayed with the reports I am constantly hearing regarding poor performance and stability of the Promise RAID solution. Throughout the forum, all I seem to read are comments and posts about your bad experiences with Promise solutions.

I have been in contact with Nexsan who produce a Promise equivalent and I have to say the figures look impressive. The below link will give you an idea..

http://www.nexsan.com/satabeastxi/

Should I go with the 'norm' or give the Nexsan solution a whirl? Does anyone have experience of the SataBeast XI?

Thanks in advance,

Regards,

Chris.

[Mr.Bean]

Well Chris I do agree with you. There are lots of people who are not satisfied with Promise both stability as well as support wise.
My only concern with you going for another Raid solution is that Apple "blessed" Promise, so now if tomorrow you go to Apple for some support and they reply saying since you have used ABC or XYZ we would not be in a position to help you in this scenario. What do you do?
Chris I did read somewhere in Xsanity someone trying to implement SataBeast XI, search the older posts.
And yes, I and many others would like to read if someone else is using another Raid solution apart from Promise. Please chime in with your inputs guys.

cheers,
Mr.Bean

[Bryson]

Here's my input on this san solution. (only since input was sought)

Buy from a solid dealer, hire the best guys you can find to build it. (they're all on here) and do whatever they say. Don't trust Apple, don't trust a dealer that's never sold xsan, don't even trust your Mom (she doesn't know anything about fiber sans anyway)

Applecare is useless when you're dropping frames at 11pm on Friday night.

I won't advise you to give yourself a root canal and I won't advise you to "integrate" your own xsan by yourself either. There are answers to this potentially expensive and painful question, but they lie in the cellphones of the techs who do this every day for a living. Buzz Metamedia, Tekserve, Homerun Media, etc and you will get an answer to this issue... and a nice san. Don't lose your job over a badly installed system. When the san goes down, everyone goes home.

Anyone here ever seen a "SataBeast" spit even one pixel of video? I'm sure it rocks, but I can't say, having never seen one if the wild. I lust like to see things work first. (strangely, the "numbers" often change when you take raids out of the lab. I don't understand how this happens. Maybe electrons move faster in lab settings.

And who wants to be first to "test" one in their rig? Come on, Fritz, you're young and brave!

I noticed that pic of 200TB of Infortrend on here. hmm.. wonder if that works or if Aaron had to move to Venezuela to escape the lawsuit?

I hear MattyG rolled out 480TB of Promise a while back. I'll bet he knows exactly what it will do and how it all works. Both of those guy's companies have listed phone numbers.

The point is, there are a ton of folks on here who have used a lot of different storage products but I wouldn't trust one bit of free advice. Collect it, do your research but in the end, get someone who can assure you that it will all work, or they'll take it all back.

If this sounded cranky, I'm really not that bad of a guy and I'm sure not mad. But I truly believe that people should trust manufacturers less. lol I wish everyone was as solid as the guys on this forum.

Oh, and the original question.. lol (I forgot) My local dealer has sold a ton of Promise boxes and hasn't had one come back yet. They seem buggy to set up but so far they haven't had a client have one fail. Can't say that about the Xserve raid and Apple sold a boatload of those for xsan.

P.S. I keep hearing about people running xsan on G-Speeds. Where are these people or is this just G-Tech guys talking?

peace out!

[Bryson]

Oh, and one final note... no one posts when stuff works. lol

[ChrisWood]

Folks - thanks for your comments. Looking good so far - lets keep them coming!

From what I understand of it, and I've been in the technology arena for some time now - manufacturers will only ever support their own physical hardware. Lets not forget, although Apply "qualify" the Promise solution for use with an XSan, the product is still owned, developed and mainted by PromiseTechnology. I have raised this with our Apple account manager who has if I'm honest - been a little vaugue in regards to detail of how a support process would work. We're a big company with a lot of power for contract negatioation and we can normally forge some pretty tight deals - but Apple didn't really want to say what happens when we have exausted the software avenues of troubleshooting. I get the impression we'll still be sent to Promise for further support. Again, Apple re-sell the product as part of the website and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure, and would almost put money on it knowing how companies work, that Apple may attempt to palm off the problem to promise once they have investigated the software avenues.

How have people found obtaining support from Apple when they have a PromiseRaid installed? Where do these boundries lie?

As an additional thought - what are peoples thoughts regarding an Avid ISIS solution with an XSAN?

Thoughts?

Regards,

Chris.

[aaron]

[MattG]

If you mistakenly buy AppleCare Xsan Support as a sole means to support your SAN config, and call them with an issue that they eventually (and that is a loose term) determine is due to the Promise RAIDs, they add value by providing the domestic 800# for Promise support and say "good luck."

Now, Promise does have a domestic 800# support system, and from most accounts, a rather responsive and reliable one. They speak English and do so with ease. They do often ask for machine logs before approving an RMA, but once you jump through that hoop, it seems to go fairly well (unless you are in India and Promise tries to slap you with customs charges on RMA gear).

But an admin's due diligence is to have at least one cold drive module, and one of Apple's resold Promise spare parts kits (a "steal" at just $3,800), so that you are not relying on the speed of that RMA to stay reliably up.

[fritz.]

[Bryson]

This is my favorite thread ever.

Aaron, I know that thing is solid. You guys are complete pros. But the point is that you back that solution and that, in my opinion is better than a manufacturer's support.

Matt G made me spit out my pepsi with the "added value" quote. I still don't understand how that Apple/Promise partnership works but I'm getting to meet the Promise support guys soon. I'll report back once I do.

and Fritz... if you have a SATAbeast demo, I'll swap you a look at my Evo. (that sounded perverted)

Peace to you all. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

[ChrisWood]

Hi All,

Ok - so I now have an evaluation SataBeast XI solution in on evaluation and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. Although getting it racked was a bit of a swine (due to a crappy rail kit), it was quick and simple to setup and in testing it's running pretty fast. I was also suprised at how cool it runs - considering it's a 4U unit with 40TB of capacity!! I thought it would be on it's knees basking in it's own heat by now.

I've heard the promise stuff isn't great for simplicity of setup...can anyone confirm or deny this?

Cheers,

Chris.

[sith33]

We've been running a satabeast (not the xi) for about six months and have been very happy with it. Relatively small setup - 6 xserves. Just did our first volume expansion with the satabeast and it was smooth sailing. Performance is pretty remarkable...

[Promise]

Chris,
I know my view is in favor of Promise, but I wanted to put my input in. Promise has been working directly with Apple on the Vtrak unit. We have a lot of time in engineering our product to work with Xsan 2. Our product is the official replacement of the Xserve raid and has a lot of great new features. We have 4 ports of 4GB fibre, Active / Active controllers, cable failover and load balancing just to name a few. With Xsan we can scale out and grow your network while increasing performance and giving you more streams of HD video without dropping frames. A lot of our competitors boast they can do a lot of bandwidth or x number of streams but never show how they achieve their results. What we are offering is a scalable solution that guaranties a lot of bandwidth to a lot of streams without dropping frames. I think sometime people over look that we are offering; we are not trying to push burst rates or tons of drives in one box that is not scalable. We are offering a solution that offers you more streams of even data across a lot of users without dropping frames. As you get a need for more streams of data you add more boxes thus increasing overall SAN size and performance as you scale.

One of the biggest factures in choosing a promise Xsan solution is support. When using Our Apple Vtrak in an Apple environment you have full support on both your hardware and software. You can have support all the way from your application, to your O/S, to your Hardware. That full support coverage for your entire environment is priceless when setting up SAN. Promise and Apple carry the same support number throughout the case when handling an issue. This provides a support from both companies and can be escalated up to the top developers of the product.

We currently have deployments in major TV stations, movies studios and broadcast environments with some environments using over 100 clients editing to one very large Xsan.

Please remember people this forum is to help people having issues and addressing how to overcome them. I hope you don’t see it as a product review. A majority of the issues we see are improper setup and we are working on was to better improve this like our new quick start guide. As you can see there are a lot of people using the Promise units in these forums and there is a lot of expertise answering your questions here to help.
I’d be happy to discuss our solution in more detail to anyone, give us a call:
1-800-888-0245 option 2 or Apple@promise.com

[GaryWatson]

Just wanted to introduce myself -- I'm the CTO and co-founder of Nexsan technologies and I occasionally lurk on Xsanity and other Apple websites not only because we have the SATABeast xi, but also because I'm a Final Cut user, and an iPhone developer.

If you have technical questions about Nexsan products the quickest way to get info is to simply contact our support team via phone or email, and they will hook you up. We don't employ robots or outsoucers to handle our support -- just people.

And of course you can just talk to me.

For the guy who thought the SATABeast was too loud, it's probably an older unit before we added variable speed fans. I think you can get an upgrade for a nominal fee or perhaps free if you contact support.

Cheers,
Gary

[gsprague]

Hello,

I am currently setting up an Xsan 2 Promise test environment to go live in a couple weeks with a replica failover Promise setup. Setting up the test environment was a snap and very simple. I am currently not running 4GB due to my older Qlogic switch but will be upgrading that shortly. The Promise RAID as not seen any heavy usage at this time but I will be sure to report back once the setup goes live.

Just an FYI...if you are planning on upgrading to Xsan2, spotlight doesn't work.

[ChrisWood]

Well folks I've done it.....a 120TB XSAN 2.1.1 installation on leopard 10.5.6 and NexSAN SATABeast XI Storage and it's brilliant. The performance and reliability are outstanding and it can be setup by a 12 year old!

So there you go - it can be done. Feel free to drop me a message if you'd like any further info.

Best Regards,

Chris.