So....I need to buy a replacement SAN/NAS this week.

[seawolf]

Could argue that if a company releases a buggy unstable firmware at any point in an enterprise products lifecycle that his distaste for them is somewhat warranted.

 

But then you would be arguing that we should have a distaste for ALL SAN vendors, because they have all released buggy firmware at some point in a product lifecycle, and all SANs will have some bugs in current firmware. The buggy firmware for the 7000s came early in the introduction of the product and whenSun was on the market.

[seawolf]

I had a 7110 and a 7120, the firmwares were as bad as each other, iSCSI performance sucked on both boxes on any firmware, SMB was ok but if you had to restart your DNS service then the box would choke till you reset the SMB Service and if you had any latency on DNS it would randomly stop sharing. NFS was reliable though, it never dropped my VMs ever which was good.

 

The statement unplug and it just start, true to a point, again if your DNS isn't 100% perfect then you had no chance with it, if it started before the DNS was ready it would freeze / lock up / not respond and then log files would slowly fill the disks making the box moan.

 

The GUI would randomly sulk if you had too many analytics open which was a shame as I enjoyed using them as they were amazing and that is one thing EMC kit lacks is those amazing analytics.

 

Firmware wise,if anything, the Oracle FW was worse than the Sun ones, I remember the first Oracle branded F/W for them, man it was atrocious and was agreed by a number on here at that time. At least with Sun new F/W was out often which was good as bugs were being fixed, updates and new features added etc... but now its Oracle its not that often, when I last looked it must have been 3 releases or so in the space that in the old Sun days we would have had 10.

 

Having seem what an EMC bit of tin does as we have enough of them where I now work and the issues I and others on here had with the Sun kit (including a colleague I work with) I would not spend that money again on them it would be better invested in something from EMC.

 

RE the support, when it used to be few hundred £s a year with Sun and it shot up to be closer to £1K for the 7110 as Oracle only were willing to do a Platinum 24x7x365 support contract at the time that isn't what we wanted and thus blew the budget and the 7120 was even worse which was a shame, with the costs of those contracts in a few years we could have bought a new EMC array instead. But as the kit was buggy and the only way of support is via them its too bigger risk to take to not have the support on hand. I did get some money out of the contract as the 7120 started eating HDDs 3 in 3 weeks so that is a few quid of value.

 

In the latter times I found the support was also less than acceptable, it seems that the UK had lost its Storage team based in Reading as they were excellent but I never managed to deal with one of them in the last 6 months maybe they have all left, certainly most of the people I had an email for it was returned as undelivered implying they had left which was sad as there was a lot of long timers in that team that knew the kit from day 1 and you could tell were suffering at the hands of Oracle.

 

Support cases were too often fobbed off on your using it wrong, wrong type of data being stored despite asking for advice from them on setup etc.... Best one is the data we were storing was not the right type and had caused a high fragmentation thus it needed re-building from scratch, which is great but where do I put all those TBs of data to allow me to do that, as a result cases were just being closed with cannot do anything till you reformat so I said can they help with a loan unit to move the data to etc... to which there was no response or offer of help / suggestions on what we could do other than buy another SAN as obviously I have thousands of £'s laying around doing nothing....

 

I'm interested when you last used the 7000s because the issues with iSCSI and SMB performance are gone. I have a 7320 and recently tested a 7120 and performance is fantastic - much better than the HPs for equivalent cost. The DNS issue was a pain in the....but that is gone as well. I've had good support from Oracle, but I also have good a Oracle supplier that I work with. It sounds like UK support isn't good.

 

Down here, I've been told by several people to stay away from EMC as the support was terrible and expensive. At one point when I was considering EMC as a vendor I was told by their distributor in Oz that no EMC SAN units were available in country for at least 2 months. That was ridiculous, so they got no look from me. Clearly support and availability are much better in the UK for EMC.

[SYNACK]

I'm interested when you last used the 7000s because the issues with iSCSI and SMB performance are gone. I have a 7320 and recently tested a 7120 and performance is fantastic - much better than the HPs for equivalent cost. The DNS issue was a pain in the....but that is gone as well. I've had good support from Oracle, but I also have good a Oracle supplier that I work with. It sounds like UK support isn't good.

 

Down here, I've been told by several people to stay away from EMC as the support was terrible and expensive. At one point when I was considering EMC as a vendor I was told by their distributor in Oz that no EMC SAN units were available in country for at least 2 months. That was ridiculous, so they got no look from me. Clearly support and availability are much better in the UK for EMC.

 

All vendors have a few dog products but buying from Oracle is nuts, given their sckuttling of their business units, insane support fees, god awefull security in Java. If they built a jail the only people that could not get in and out would be the guards, it would cost double the gdp per month to run it and they would pull support after six months.

[seawolf]

All vendors have a few dog products but buying from Oracle is nuts, given their sckuttling of their business units, insane support fees, god awefull security in Java. If they built a jail the only people that could not get in and out would be the guards, it would cost double the gdp per month to run it and they would pull support after six months.

 

So glad to hear a rational argument. And of course my Sun/Oracle kit breaks down every other week, that's part of the fun in owning it ;-)

[john]

I'm interested when you last used the 7000s because the issues with iSCSI and SMB performance are gone. I have a 7320 and recently tested a 7120 and performance is fantastic - much better than the HPs for equivalent cost. The DNS issue was a pain in the....but that is gone as well. I've had good support from Oracle, but I also have good a Oracle supplier that I work with. It sounds like UK support isn't good.

 

Down here, I've been told by several people to stay away from EMC as the support was terrible and expensive. At one point when I was considering EMC as a vendor I was told by their distributor in Oz that no EMC SAN units were available in country for at least 2 months. That was ridiculous, so they got no look from me. Clearly support and availability are much better in the UK for EMC.

 

A couple of months ago and had been using since the very early days of the 7110 all you have to do is search here and you will find that I once was happy but it gradually got less and less happy to the point I wouldn't even consider them anymore.

 

Maybe you have better support from Oracle, maybe they have no interest in the UK Market. Certainly for UK I would not consider one and would be looking at EMC.

[Soulfish]

Personally I'd go EMC. The VNX series is quite a nice piece of kit. When getting quotes make sure to tell them they're competing against NetApp, Dell and HP. They'll drop the prices quicker than you can blink to win the business .

[seawolf]

A couple of months ago and had been using since the very early days of the 7110 all you have to do is search here and you will find that I once was happy but it gradually got less and less happy to the point I wouldn't even consider them anymore.

 

Maybe you have better support from Oracle, maybe they have no interest in the UK Market. Certainly for UK I would not consider one and would be looking at EMC.

 

Seems to be strong support in the UK for EMC. Not so much here. Maybe EMC doesn't care much about the Aussie market, much as it sounds Oracle doesn't in UK. Well, that's why I always suggest people get demo units before they commit, especially with equipment that costs north of 15k.

[NimbleStorage]

Hi Pete

What did you go for in the end? And if its been installed how is it going?

[PotNoodleTech]

So glad to hear a rational argument. And of course my Sun/Oracle kit breaks down every other week, that's part of the fun in owning it ;-)

 

Your arguing with people who have already been bitten by oracle once... badly and are now twice shy (or maybe 10 times shy, in my case).

 

No argument no matter how rational or well presented, would ever convince me to touch anything from oracle with a barge poll. I got so fed up with poor performance that I repurposed my 7110s as Vmware ESXi boxes and they're still going strong (and reliably) now that the Sun/Oracel software is long gone (whilst I was doing this I discovered that the 7110s used software raid, which explains to me why write perfromance was so bad with no cache).

 

The Sun hardware was exceptional, the software was mediocre but improving slowly, the support good from sun, appaling from oracle.

 

I strongly do not reccomend anyone on edugeek buy any oracle storage devices under pain of dissapointment, hideous long term expense and risk of downtime.

 

My2p™

[mac_shinobi]

Your arguing with people who have already been bitten by oracle once... badly and are now twice shy (or maybe 10 times shy, in my case).

My2p™

 

Was that meant to be a binary pun / joke or am I mis-reading that ?

[seawolf]

Your arguing with people who have already been bitten by oracle once... badly and are now twice shy (or maybe 10 times shy, in my case).

No argument no matter how rational or well presented, would ever convince me to touch anything from oracle with a barge poll.

 

The worst car that I've ever owned in my 25 years of driving (and I've owned 14 cars) was a VW Jetta. That thing overheated and broke down on me so often that I found the Bus to be far more reliable and quicker for any trip longer than 15 minutes. Would I ever own a VW again? Yes, because I know that it was an outlier, a lemon and that the broader experience of people buying VWs is much different than my individual experience appeared to belie. Those who have problems often voice their dissatisfaction much more often and louder than those with good experiences with the same products as well, so making judgements based on the noise coming from a few customers of a product is a bad way to make a decision.

 

I got so fed up with poor performance that I repurposed my 7110s as Vmware ESXi boxes and they're still going strong (and reliably) now that the Sun/Oracel software is long gone (whilst I was doing this I discovered that the 7110s used software raid, which explains to me why write perfromance was so bad with no cache).

 

It appears that you purchased your 7110 without an understanding of what you were buying. It is generally a VERY bad idea to use hardware RAID in conjunction with ZFS. The ZFS handles all of the RAID functions and a hardware RAID controller will only get in the way and possible cause corruption. It also makes the hardware RAID controller a single point of failure in the system. So, of course the 7110 uses software RAID, that is what you are getting with ZFS, which is by the way one of the best if not THE best file and RAID systems on the planet. Here's a little example of what makes ZFS so good - Suns's ZFS Demo - YouTube

 

Now, as to poor performance, well that all depends on what you were using it for. The 7110 only has 8GB of RAM and no write caches. So, it has very little RAM to use as ARC and no upgradeability for write caches. That is a limitation on the 7110, but if you know what you're doing when spec'ing and configuring your systems (e.g. deciding on RAID level used) you would take that into account. In my case, the 7110 running in RAIDZ2 was perfectly fine until I went over 15 VM servers and 300 clients (now at 25 servers and 600 clients) at which point I had to reconfigure the raid as a mirror (resulting in much less storage space) until I recently needed to upgrade to a more suitable unit. That wasn't a problem with the 7110 per se, just that our growth far exceeded my expectations over a 3 1/2 year period. Our new 7320 has 96GB of RAM and two ZeusIOPS write caches and it blew the doors off of other equivalently priced SAN systems that I tested. So, to say that the Sun/Oracle 7000 series SANS exhibit poor performance is not the reality. Like any other system, you have to spec it for the requirements or you will be disappointed. Perhaps you were sold the 7110 by unscrupulous or ignorant salesman who lied to you, I don't know.

 

The Sun hardware was exceptional, the software was mediocre but improving slowly, the support good from sun, appaling from oracle.

 

I strongly do not reccomend anyone on edugeek buy any oracle storage devices under pain of dissapointment, hideous long term expense and risk of downtime.

 

My2p™

 

I agree, the sun hardware is exceptional, which is why I have used it for the past 15+ years. I have also used Dell, HP, IBM, and SuperMicro hardware which was generally quite good, but just not at the same level as Sun.

 

I also agree with the initial state of the s7000 (Fishworks) software in 2009 and early 2010. Since then though, the software has ranged from quite good to excellent now. The initial transition from Sun or Oracle did cause a bit of support hell, but it has been quite good the past couple of years (at least as good as I've experienced from HP and better than the mediocre support from VMWare).