Good product with great potential but

Hi,

we want to consolidate our storage (3000+ employees ) to iSCSI technology and we need storage for our VMware ESX farm and XEN servers.

For the past weeks we've evaluated iSCSI-R3 Enterprise 2.32 build 2863 .
We found an very interesting product that fits our needs but

we have 3 big points that totally disqualify the system:


1. We have HP UPS's and therefore we can't use the integrated APC UPS module to do a clean shutdown if a power failure occurs. There is NO way to shutdown the system remotely. I repeat, NO way. (a "real" access to a tiny ssh shell would be enough to send an shutdown command)


2. If we disconnect the iSCSI system physically from our ESX's (3.0.2 / 3.5) (pull the cables to simulate a switch failure) the ESX's can't reconnect to the iSCSi targets and therefore they don't see the LUN's (can be a VMware issue also). Only a reboot of the iSCSI system solved the issue.


3. There is no way to automatically and remotely monitoring the system. We use Nagios and tried a few methods to monitor the hardware status and other things. SNMP isn't available (only "not important" OID's) and SNMPTrap's aren't available, too.
Also no remote access to aacli is available (test system uses an Adaptec 3805)



In my opinion the most important of managing a storage system is the monitoring of the system's heart, the RAID-Controller and the harddrives.


To Open-E, please consider this in your development process. For most customers theses functions (clean shutdown to prevent data corruption and monitoring the system to provide availability) is more important than new features .....



MfG

Björn / Germany