Anyone using a Nexsan Satabeast array?

[jonny_smith]

Hi people, we're looking into the possibilty of purchasing a NexSAN SataBeast to use in our SAN. Ideally LUNs will be created on the array and then assigned to hosts such as an E2900 running Solaris 10, Symantec Storage Foundation Suite 4.1 and Oracle 10g.

I was hoping anyone who has had experience of these arrays could give me an insight into any hidden problems that weren't foreseen at the time of purchase. I did read somewhere that the data cache isn't battery backed up and I'm not too sure about the idea of spinning disks up/down via AutoMaid etc.

Any feedback albeit positive or negative would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Jonathan.

[Gaurav_S · Accepted solution]

Hello Jonathan,

Not very sure on hardware part, however I just checked the HCL for SF 4.1MP2 for veritas, I don't see NexSAN in supportability list... so what I understand is you wil need to use this array as a JBOD which itself is limits you to certain functionalities of array... Also Symantec would state you same at very first stage about supportability.....

If you plan to use a cluster, can't say if IOFencing would be supported as it works with SCSI 3 reservations which won't be there on SATA based array ..


Gaurav

[Dev_Roy]

That's right Gaurav.

Jonathan, from your infromation above I understand that you have not yet purchassed the SAN, if you need to purchase and you need SF support for that then please first check the HCL and then select the best  possible supported SAN as outlined in the following HCL guide.
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/275752.htm

I would also like to point out that 4.1 is older version and you may miss lot of new features and enhancements. I would recommend you go for minimum 5.0MP3 or else you may go for the latest version which 5.1. Old version would reach their End of Support Life ( EOSL ) soon and you may not like to have another downtime soon. You can take a look at the following link to know EOSL dates for various products. As you have not mentioned your OS hence I am not able to tell you the EOSL date.
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/release_details.jsp?pid=15107

Hope this helps.
Merry christmas to you!!!


Regards,
Dev Roy.

[jonny_smith]

Thanks guys. 

Sorry Dev, OS is  Solaris 10.

The NexSAN array would simply be added to our exisiting SAN infrastructure (which is a mixture of SUN fibre attached arrays). Any LUNs created on the NexSAN array would be added to existing diskgroups across various hosts so that vx volumes can be mirrored to a remote site.

I am aware that 4.1 is the older version of SF but at the moment it does the job on servers which run it so I don't want to upgrade it although we are running 5.0MP3 running on some of our servers.

Just generally looking for any hidden nasties with this array seeing as though it's not on Sun or Symantec's HCL.

Regards,

Jonathan.

[Dev_Roy]

I chekced the HCL of 5.0MP3 as well.
Affraid to state that, it is neither supported on SF4.1 nor on SF5.0MP3.

Regards,
Dev

[Gaurav_S]

searched around it.... nothing as such found... not sure if Symantec have any internal cases on the same....


Gaurav

[jonny_smith]

Cheers guys, thought as much....

[Gary_Watson]

Howdy,

Just to clarify one important point, all of our storage products have battery backed up, ECC-protected cache.  There is a battery for each RAID controller, so if you purchased an two RAID controllers, you have redundant battery protection; additionally write cache data is mirrored between the controllers (and it's true active/active as well, unlike a LOT of competitors).   We're happy to discuss anything about our architecture if you have further questions...

Cheers,

Gary Watson
CTO
Nexsan Technologies

[jonny_smith]

Thanks for clarifying that Gary. However, can you shed any light on why NexSAN beasts don't appear on the Hardware Compatibility Lists for either Symantec or Sun Microsystems?

Regards,

Jonathan.

[Gary_Watson]

Hi Jonathan,

Actually it's a very good question as to why we aren't on the HCL, so I've passed it along to the Powers That Be to see what can be done.  We've been used with Veritas (Symantec) for years and years by probably thousands of users, so in general we work well.   But I agree that we should try to be on any applicable HCL, and since we've done a variety of joint-marketing with Symantec and Veritas over the years, we ought to be able to get this done sometime soon.  As a matter of fact, we use VxFS in one of our products...

Cheers,

Gary Watson
CTO
Nexsan Technologies, Inc.

[Gaurav_S]

Hello Gary,

I was with Technical support for quite a long & use to have interaction with variety of customers, trust me HCL's are reffered a lot (even for marketing purpose), any new customer before buying a new infrastructure would refer to HCL to know whether he would be supported or not.... would be really great for you to get your product listed on HCL....

Also was curious to know, if array is SATA based & been working as shared storage for years, what data prevention mechanism was used in occurance of split brain ? since for sure o SATA based technology, IOFencing won't work...

Gaurav