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3600 appliance opinions

Matt_Scratt
Not applicable

Looking for some real world opinions on the 3600 appliance.

 

 

Thinking of using them at several branch offices throughout the country.

 

work well?

ease of setup?

what would you do different? 

all that stuff!

 

I am familiar with using BE software. 

 

Thanks,

 

matt 

18 REPLIES 18

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

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,

 

 

 

 

CraigV
Moderator
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"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!

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

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

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

CraigV
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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!

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

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

 

CraigV
Moderator
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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!

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

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

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

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.:)

 

 

 

 

pkh
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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.

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

PKH.

this is NOT a recommendation, it is a possibility which can be thought of..please read through the lines....

As i see its getting complicated,

Please PM me for any further points/issues/concerns, this ensures that the Ambiguity in understanding is eliminated and we may be able to help the primary concerns raised by the poster.

Rather making this a platform of mutual influences and moving away from the purpose of original post.

 

Regards,

Vishal Shinde

 

 

pkh
Moderator
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You are telling the user what to do when there is a RAID failure and it is not a recommendation???

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

Just an FYI, changing the configuration is NOT supported, but the steps mentioned are from the Admin guide for 3600.

This expresses any users thought, knowing the Appliance, as evident from the used cases we have.

Please  do not hastily read the contents in bits and parts and get too anxious to post, please take your time..go through the entire content of what it is all about and them come up with technically relevant content, helpful to reader.

 Again I reiterate do not make this a ground for arguments. It is not really doing any good for the Symantec Brand.

Regards,

Vishal Shinde

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

An excerpt from my previous comment, for clarity:

===============================================================================

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.:)

=============================================================================

I am sure, now that you have read it, you will find that it is neither a recommendation nor a suggestion too.

Just a possibility  ..(which is not supported..)

 

 

 

pkh
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the steps mentioned are from the Admin guide for 3600.

What steps are you referring to?  Reconfiguring the RAID to RAID 0?

Vishal_Shinde
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

what did you find in Admin guide,in the above context?

pkh
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You are not making sense. You mentioned earlier that the steps are found in the Admin Guide so I am asking you what steps are these. I am not the one who mentioned the Admin Guide first.

joeyharper
Level 3

We have two 3600 R2 appliances. One acting as a CASO, the other as an MMS. We are using them to backup our servers in one site then replicate to DR before writing to tape. Unfortunately we've been troubleshooting some niggles that have prevented us from going live, but are working on them. For example:

  • Some jobs have stopped using client-side de-dupe when they used to use it (not a huge issue, more of an annoyance)
  • The throughput on some jobs is very poor while others are great.This hasn't always been the case and we're looking into where the performance drop has come from.
  • The change to the job monitor hasn't bothered me too much but it is a bit frustrating having to change the settings across 20 jobs rather than just 1. Am happy though that once it's working we won't have to touch it too much.
  • We're also yet to backup to disk, then duplicate, then write to tape as setting up the job schedule is a bit fiddly. Working on that too.
  • We also saw the services stopping from time to time. For example on a Monday morning we'd go to check how the backups performed to find the job engine hung on Friday and nothing had happened. I'm hopeful these are 'teething' problems while the system settles down.

We have just updated to SP3 so are keen to see if it helps with the issues above.

I think it's a good system, it just needs time and effort to get it fully going. I don't disagree that you can unbox it and be backing up within an hour but we've found that we're still not at the stage where we can confidently guarantee that it will perform our backups.