3600 appliance opinions

pros:

1. 3600 is shipped with OS installed on 80 gb SSD drives (RAID 1), which makes it much faster.

2. Licensing Hassle is minimized as it is everything is bundled in one.

4. It comes with inbuilt security.

5. Auto call feature, which creates a ticket proactively for the hardware failure.

 

Cons:

1. Limited storage, 5.5 TB (RAID 5), if RAID is broken, then extends to 20 TB.

2. Only one SAS interface is present, as a provision for a tape drive.

3. It is Windows based and not Linux based.

4. Only 4 hard drive Bays, which are pre-occupied.

 

You may find more details in 3600 Admin guide,

 

 

 

 

"Limited storage, 5.5TB (RAID 5), if RAID is broken, then extends to 20 TB".

 

How so? If RAID is broken, you end up with 4 drives (possibly) and how would you get 20TB out of those? You have no redundancy whatsoever either...

Thanks!

Hello CraigV,

thank you for pointing the typo error in the previous comment.

If the RAID is broken it will be (2 TB x 4) i.e 8 TB  non-deduped space.

Kind regards,

S

If the RAID is broken, does the appliance still work?

4 drives in RAID5 gives you 5.5TB. 1 drive is basically lost for parity. So, lose 1 drive and you still have 5.5TB but then have an issue with degraded performance, and with the loss of another drive, total loss of data. When a RAID set is broken it is broken, The OS does not see 4 x 2TB drives anymore...that information, stored in the RAID controller is gone, and only available once reconfigured. Unlessn there is a hot spare configured (which the appliance does not have), the failed drive needs to be replaced as soon as possible. Thanks!

Hold on Craig,,..I never said that 8 TB is a useable space, I just pointed out the total storage shipped with the appliance.

Regards,

S

 

Yout words were that if RAID was broken there would be 8TB of dedupe space. The answer to this is 0TB space unless configured in which case it is 5.5TB. You never clarified this in your post (your original comment was 20TB!). The space would actually be classified as 8TB RAW...the 5.5TB coming about due to RAID configuration overhead and the loss of 1 drive's space for parity. Thanks!

Hi Craig,

Please read the comment carefully, before you comment:

If the RAID is broken it will be (2 TB x 4) i.e 8 TB  non-deduped space.

 

Regards,

Vishal Shinde

I do agree that raid-5 is what is shipped with the Appliance and we (Symantec) will not support any changes in the configurations, like RAID, adding any software or teaming the NICs etc.

As the hardware provided is tested and tuned to give the optimized performance and ensuring the reliability at maximum.

Having said that, we cannot stop a user(need not be a RAID guru) to think of using Remote management Module to access the Appliance, by making the required changes in the BIOS for the baseboard LAN.

Use the RAID web Console 2 utility to re-configure the 4 drives with RAID 0. And use the complete 8 TB of RAW space, but this will be without the parity.

Though not supported , but possible.:)

 

 

 

 

Use the RAID web Console 2 utility to re-configure the 4 drives with RAID 0. And use the complete 8 TB of RAW space, but this will be without the parity.

Why are you recommending an unsupported configuration?  Furthermore, isn't this recommendation going against the purpose of having an appliance in the first place?  That is, not having to do any configuration.