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Oct
21

New SAN Arrives!

Posted under Church IT by Jim

misan Ahhhh, ain’t she pretty? We recently purchased this Cybernetics miSAN-D (pronounced “my SAN” if you’re wondering) unit to be our first “real” SAN. It’s a 12 Terabyte (raw) model using SATA-II drives and 4GB of cache.

We’ve been virtualized via VMware for quite a while now, but realized we were not taking full advantage of virtualization by using plain-old local storage on each server. We still can’t afford full blown VMotion, but by putting our virtual machines on the SAN at least I will be able to manually move them between boxes when needed.

The miSAN will also be used for boring old file storage, which we are woefully lacking right now. You may be wondering why we chose a SAN you’ve probably never heard of? There are multiple reasons:

  • I’ve used a lot of Cybernetics gear in the past (tape loaders, virtual tape caches, etc) and like the company and their products.
  • A colleague of mine has been using a miSAN for nearly a year, and she says it works and performs as advertised.
  • Bang-for-the-Buck. Sure, I would have liked to start with a “big name” SAN like Equalogic or EMC, but these are simply out of our price range. And at the opposite extreme low end I couldn’t find decent performance or features. The miSAN seems to sit right in the sweet spot for us… good price (12 TB raw for under 13k), good performance, and features you don’t find on low-end SANs like snapshots, HA failover to an identical unit, per-LUN replication to another local unit OR a unit sitting across a WAN, de-duplication and built-in scheduled offloading to tape to name a few.

We have a bit more planning to do before firing up the miSAN, but we are moving forward rapidly. The biggest decision I have to make at this point is how to provision the base storage… multiple RAIDS, one giant RAID5 (or 6), or a RAID50… it’s that nagging balance between safety/redundancy and useable space…. Hmmm.

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  1. Jon Said,

    Jim,
    I am looking at the Cybernetics MiSAN to do exactly what you are doing. I am going to use for pure file storage, email , db and then as a SAN for virtualization. I was wondering how it is performing and if you would recommend the box? Blog is great by the way!! Thanks!

  2. jmichael Said,

    Hi Jon-

    Thanks for writing! I probably should blog my miSAN experience directly, but just haven’t gotten around to it. I’m sorry to say that I cannot recommend the miSAN in good conscience. While I am making it work for us, it (in my opinion) is not up to the standards that other SANs have set and cannot be considered an enterprise-class device. There are some serious flaws in the design… one small example: the SAN lets you delete a LUN *even if* it is being used by, say, ESX. This can cause HUGE problems for ESX (if the storage disappears before you officially DELETE the datastore from ESX) and it’s a pain to fix. Other SANs warn you of this and don’t let you delete the LUN until it isn’t in use. Also, when you upgrade the firmware, it deletes ALL of your configuration (which you can easily restore from backup), but this is a PITA because you must at the very least set up a machine with the default 192.168.x.x IP of the unit and configure it as if it were brand new. Very tacky!

    Another colleague of mine with a miSAN has had continual chronic problems with the HA failover of her units… so much so that I refuse to use the miSAN snapshots/replication myself (simply can’t trust it), which was one of the huge selling points for me. Alas, the nice price point of miSAN is outweighed by its bad interface and bad code. As a raw iSCSI target it performs decently and is stable, but that’s about it. If I had to do it again I would be buying Equallogic (you get what you pay for in a SAN) but even a MD3000 or HP unit would be better than miSAN, in my experience.

  3. Jim’s Junk » Blog Archive » Seagate Drive Woes Said,

    [...] yeah… did I mention that our new SAN has twelve of these drives in it? Joy. At least we’re (thankfully) not using the SAN in [...]

  4. Bobby_at_BBC Said,

    Jim, any update on this unit? Did you address your concerns to Cybernetics? What were their responses?

  5. Jim Said,

    Hi Bobby, thanks for writing. I just blogged about our Cybernetics miSAN experience. Check it out http://blogs.wcrossing.org/jmichael/2010/06/cybernetics-misan-take-two/

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