san

[George Magklaras]

About a year ago, I implemented for an external client one of the 
earliest SATABoy arrays to make up a 5.6 Tbyte volume for some heavy I/O 
. The end hosts were wearing the Dual port 2 Gig controllers and the 
goal then was to achieve a relatively cheap and reliable active-active 
failover configuration (RDBMS that needed protection). So this is an 
overview of the setup, can give you more details if you wish.

My experience: Apart from original hickups with some failing drives that 
were replaced quickly and some performance glitches that went to some 
issues with the RedHat kernel and the need to tune OS parameters in 
details to get the most out of it, the experience was OK. A couple of 
cache consistency issues between the controllers were dealt quickly and 
the system is pretty much rock solid today, with a solution that costed 
substantially less than going to the host server vendor and buy a package.

If there is one negative thing I have to say (and that is only my humble 
opinion) is that I got the feeling that Nexsan is too reliant on channel 
and re-selling partners. This had a ping-pong effect (I have problem 
A...OK, you need to talk to RedHat...RedHat saying no you don't, this is 
a server vendor issue...The server vendor says, sorry this is not an 
approved I/O solution from us...) until you get to a Nexsan engineer. I 
would like this contact hierarchy to have fewer nodes or branches and 
offer a more integrated solution with fewer referalls.

That could also be region specific depending on who's your re-seller or 
channel partner and how big you are. But in my case, it worked out fine 
because we had at least 8 weeks to place the system into testing mode 
and then another month of application testing. Should the timescales had 
been smaller, I would probably have a different view.

GM

Keith Clay wrote:
> We really just want to know if nexsan is a good product.  We have heard 
> a couple bad things, though lots of good reviews, and trying to verify 
> the product.
> 

-- 
--
George B. Magklaras

Senior Computer Systems Engineer/UNIX Systems Administrator
The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo,
University of Oslo
http://www.biotek.uio.no/

EMBnet Norway: http://www.biotek.uio.no/EMBNET/