For development purposes I was looking for a "cheap" upgrade over our aging Apple XServeRAID fiber channel arrays. These served us well, if one excludes the lack of LUN masking in the later firmware versions, but we have consistently outgrown their native capacity. Besides Apple (and its dismal enterprise support) has stopped selling them so we have been left with no choice but to look elsewhere.
The basic requirements are:
- Fiber Channel or iSCSI target support to support database workloads
- Ability to carve LUNs out of a pool that is large enough (at least 20 TB of raw storage)
- Ability to clone volumes
- Ability to take snapshots within seconds
There are a few candidates that fullfil this bill: Equallogic, Sun Thumper, 3PAR, Compellent, the XServe replacement from Promise coupled with LVM, various Overland devices.
The general hotness of ZFS and the "Try-n-buy" program from Sun made it acceptable to give their hardware and software a try. After all Solaris is not that different from linux (or should I say commute both terms), the hardware is dirt cheap (you can't get much cheaper) and Sun's expertise with hardware systems based on Opterons has been proven in-house on their wonderful SunFire x4600.
To make a long story short, the iSCSI target daemon on Solaris 10 is not stable enough for production use. We were plagued with numerous core dumps, causing the iSCSI setup to flickr and initiators to moderately appreciate the frequent interrupts. Setting up OpenSolaris seemed to help a bit but our trust in the stability of the code had suffered an irremediable blow (well, not quite irremediable, but at least for another year or so).
Pressed for time I have decided to cut our losses short and to spend more money to get a 48 TB 3PAR E200, vastly more expensive per TB but also known to work. I really wished the Thumper trial had been successful; I believe in OpenSolaris, what I've seen of ZFS makes me green with envy (compared to ext3 + LVM) but I simply cannot justify downtime and/or the hiring of a Solaris core code guru to troubleshoot this mess.
