My team is currently looking into modernizing our storage architecture and VAST Data is on our short list. We have some heavy read-intensive and analytics workloads coming down the pipeline and need something that scales well.

Right now, VAST is leading the pack for us due to their unique Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture and strong capacity savings. That said, we are completely open to other suggestions if there are better alternatives we should be evaluating.

Please note: I am strictly looking for honest feedback from hands-on admins and engineers. If you are a sales rep or VAR, please skip this post, I do not want sales pitches or DMs.

Before we move forward with getting a demo, I wanted to do some sanity checking here and get some unvarnished opinions from current or past users.

Specifically, I’d love to know:

• The Support Experience: How is the support model in practice, are there remote/onsite support? When you open a ticket, do you get knowledgeable engineers right away, or does it take a while to get past Level 1?
• Troubleshooting & Patching: Do software updates go smoothly? How do they handle bug fixes or hardware replacements in the field?
• Real-World Pros/Cons: Does the platform perform as advertised for large datasets? Is there anything you wish you knew about the architecture before you committed?

Would appreciate any insight, warnings, or experiences you can share (even via DM if you prefer to stay completely anonymous).

Thanks in advance!

Hello,

In our company, we got the opportunity to build a small lab for internal training. Our budget was $0, so we used devices that were marked for disposal. For storage, we got a Hitachi HUS 110.

The problem is that the disks were wiped and probably mixed up from several other systems. I have never worked with this kind of device before, but I found some documentation stating that we need to install the microcode/firmware from a CD, which we obviously don’t have.

We tried to contact the company that serviced these devices, but it looks like the person who knew how to recover them from this state has left, and nobody else there knows how or is willing to help.

Can anyone help us find this microcode/firmware, or guide us on where to look? Any advice on how to get this array back on its feet would be greatly appreciated!

Hi!

I have a pair of new Brocade G720 switches. Already upgraded FOS to latest 9.2.2c1.

What do you think of upgrading to FOS10 version 10.0.0a1?

Is it to early version to upgrade, especially it will be mission critical services on these SAN switches?

Hello all,

We recently got a batch of Isilon A2000s at work. After reimaging we're now dealing with an error on a Dell Isilon A2000 where after a reimaging the nodes refuse to boot complaining about missing PSI receipt.

After reading the available dell article on the issue this very likely seems to be an issue stemming from the drive sleds having been mixed up in the chassis

Can see that there are further steps to take towards getting them back in shape " Isilon: PSI receipt does not exist in mfg partition (Dell Correctable) " but alas I'm hitting a dead end due to lack of support. Anyone here know a work around?

Any input is greatly appreciated!

i have ibm storage ST400FM0243 have anyone managed to format the sector size to normal 512 ?

Dear all,

I need to access old vnx storage which ask for jre1.6

i got this decomissioned dell storage. it was (and is) working fine, but out of dell support, that's why i got it. however, none of the login credentials i got work. i tried the usb stick unlock method, but no success, idk if i should try other usb sticks or if the method simply doesn't work with the 3020. dell documentation states it's "not guaranteed to work" with this model.

i can reach the login prompt with putty, i can reach the login page of the controller but i have no working login and the dell storage client does not let me in either.. none of the default passwords work.

so, what do i do? ideally i want a complete factory reset so i can start fresh. i've read that it's possible to brick the system and since it's out of support i'm a little bit anxious about that..! i have of course full physical access and there is no data, config or anything else left to save on the system. what are the best practices here? any advice would be really appreciated!

In a conversation recently where there were discussions around the risk, if any, of FC being used as a attack channel. The specifics come down to having a air-gapped data vault that has no IP network link between the production network and the vault environment but does allow a SAN array outside of the vault to present devices to few servers inside of the vault. This was chosen due to the small footprint in the vault and cost of dedicated SAN & Array and that the systems using the FC devices are only for validation/automation purposes and do not house the protected data.

Overall there is the agreement that some "risk" exists in that if production systems were compromised, specifically the SAN, then the systems inside of the vault could have their LUNS removed rendering them offline. However, does FC provide any conduit where an attacker could use persistence to the production side array/FC Switches to make their way into the isolated environment?

What do people think about the new platform?
Anyone got any details if PowerStoreOS 5.0 will be compatible with gen1 and gen2?

Is Peer Motion supported for migrating block storage from 3par to Alletra 5050 series?
Difference between Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC) and HPE GreenLake for Block Storage? Only for MP series? Where is Peer Motion software found? Standalone utility or in the cloud? License required? I am confused! Please help!

Annnd of course my coverage with HPE is over.

Anyone have experience putting non-HPE drives into an MSA? Gotchas?

I've built two identical PCs for throughput testing on a 100 gbps NIC and I can't get the expected write throughput when using NFS over RDMA (RoCE v2). The two PCs are connected directly with a direct attach cable.

Using fio I tested the read bandwidth to be 11.6 GB/s, and yet the write bandwidth is only at 5 GB/s. Despite my best efforts I can't figure out where this bottleneck is coming from. Does anyone have any ideas for what I can look into to diagnose the issue?

I have more details on the setup and testing in this Unix StackExchange question: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/805563/nfs-over-rdma-read-2x-faster-than-write

We are getting quotes for storage refresh at the moment and IBM have come up, we have received a quote for a Flashsystem 7600 with enough raw storage to see us through 5 years of growth and the pricing is just great. Every other vendor seems to be just cranking up prices saying AI is causing it.

Any admins out there managing these and having a good or bad experience? Real world day to day management issues, reliability? I know they are pretty new so if you have the slightly older gen, the 7300 or 5200's I'd like to hear too

We have three nimble storage units that are currently being accessed via iSCSI. They aren't happy about the performance, and want to convert them to FC, by slapping FC HBAs on them and attaching them to our existing SAN. I am assuming the volumes that are already being accessed by ISCSI will be able to be accessed via FC once the conversion is done, "as they are", but this is the first time I tackle this kind of conversion and I don't know what to do expect. Any guidance or tips will be welcome.

PS: I have no part in the decision-making of the aforementioned move. It was another department that convinced management to go this way.

Hi All,

Does anyone know if its possible to reuse SSD's out of a MSA array. This is not for production only for some lab / testing. I guess into a server like a HPE DL380 etc etc

Or is it the story of locked firmware etc

Just curious if anyone is using terraform to manage on-premise flasharray. If so, could you elaborate on your workflow. Alternatively, is anyone using Ansible to manage a flasharray? My workplace will soon deploy a flasharray and we’re looking at ways to simplify and streamline storage management.

real talk guys we have about 400 LTO tapes sitting at iron mountain. weve been paying the bill for years and i honestly dont even know whats on most of them anymore. some of its old exchange backups. some of its financial stuff from like 2016. maybe some project archives from people who dont even work here anymore.every month accounting asks whats this line item for tape storage and i say "legacy data" and they say "ok" and we move on. but its like $800 a month. for tapes we will probably never touch again.

ive been thinking about this because our compliance guy finally asked "do we need these" and i didnt have a good answer.

heres the options i see lol

1)just keep paying forever. easy but feels stupid.

2)pull all the tapes back onsite and read them ourselves. but our last LTO-4 drive died in 2022 and we never replaced it. buying a used drive off ebay feels risky and reading 400 tapes manually would take forever.

3)send them to a migration theres companies like Tape Ark that take your tapes and dump everything to cloud storage like glacier. then you shred the physical tapes and stop paying iron mountain. seems clean but ive never done it.

4)just shred everything and hope nobody ever asks for anything from 2016. this is what i want to do but compliance guy said no.

what are the rest of you doing with legacy tape stockpiles? are you still vaulting? did you migrate?

curious if anyone has used a migration service and how that went. like did they read all your tapes? was it expensive? give me the real answers please .Thanks guys

Hi. Anyone with experience using 3rd party to support Dell PowerMax 2000? I have to renew support for maybe few months but Dell price is crazy. We've talked to a Park Place rep but I wonder, how they can replace the parts and set the call home. They need to login/connect physically to the SAN and have the credential. Anyway, can anyone share their experience?

Setting up a new 3-node Vmware cluster with R760s (Fibre Channel direct-connect). The ME5024 has 20x 2.4TB HDDs and 4x 1.6TB SSDs.

I’m leaning towards one big Pool on Controller A using ADAPT for the HDDs then Raid 10 for the 4x SSD so I get faster rebuilds and easier management of a single Datastore. Is the performance hit of leaving Controller B idle (Active/Passive essentially) noticeable with only 20 spinning disks, or should I stick to the 50/50 split the wizard recommends?

I know I sort of messed up and didn't buy 4 extra spinning disks...but at the moment its not really something I can do.

I work for a medium/smallish group and finally convinced management to upgrade the infrastructure. I´ve got a quote for 2 new Gigabyte servers and 2 Dell ME5024 PowerVaults.
The plan is to have each server and SAN to be in a different site the connections to each site will be a LAN 2 LAN from one of our ISP's and the limit is 1Gbps. The servers will use Proxmox to host VMs with internal services and data, and hosting some small webservers.

My question is the following:
Is it plausible to use ZFS over iSCSI on Dell SANs?
I thought its the best option for our case, since with the limited LAN 2 LAN bandwidth is best for Proxmox to handle replication for each VM and in my understanding, ZFS is the best way to handle VM replication.
If you have a better method to affront this, is also welcome.

Hi all,

I'm a programmer working on a simple storage API solution (originally came up with this idea for my personal need and then thought it might be useful for others), and I'm at a point where I need help making some product decisions, so your help is appreciated in advance.

My API is a basic simple database like storage for small script projects or simple workflows that don't need a full on database instance. It also supports storing files (object storage equivalent), the idea is to get set up in seconds by just creating a project, get an API key and that's it, you just make API calls for storing / retrieving data etc.

Where I need help on decisions is for setting data / model structures (I want to keep it the simplest possible):

1. Should that be done via an API call, UI on the web portal dashboard, or both?
2. It is ok to have custom field types (the basics: int, float, string, datetime etc.) or I should follow a specific standard (and which one)?

Appreciate any help or feedback in advance.

Edit: I'm talking about a cloud hosted RestAPI SaaS type product, not a self hosted solution.

Hopefully the right sub to ask.

There's a lot of marketing language for Vast Data / Weka and how it's more performant & cost effective for AI training and inference workloads.

I'm curious how much better these companies actually are, and what would be the primary use case for each storage vendor (with the understanding that each vendor supports multiple use cases)