2006 Nov 08 - Wed
Celeros XT816
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I have a customer who is using the Celeros XT816 3U
ExtremeSAN iSCSI based IP SAN appliance. They purchased
it because it had an exceedingly good price/storage price point. They had original plans to use it
as a primary storage unit for use with VMWare ESX server. As it turns out, after much testing, and a few chats
with tech-support, it won't work in such an arrangement with the customer's version of software. They are in
the process of gaining access to Celeros' Knowledge Portal to obtain some updates.
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I was tasked to integrate the unit into the network. The unit has a management port with a default IP
address of 192.168.1.1. Due to the regular boots and resets we've had to perform with the unit, we decided to
just stay with that address, put the management port on its own VLAN, and add the subnet into the routing
table.
The unit has 8 Gigabit ports for data transfer. They can be used individually with LUN's or the ports can
be mixed and matched for singles and bundles. In bundle mode, they supposedly use LACP as bundling protocol.
Technical support indicates that they do that with Dell PowerConnect 3424/5212/5425, Fujitsu XG800's, Raptor, D-Link
(several models), Force10, HP, Brocade, 3Com, & Extreme Networks. You'll notice that Cisco is absent from
that list. Once we can gain access to the knowledge portal, supposedly there is a work around for Cisco
switches available. We are currently running in single port mode to get at the data.
One more caveat with the unit is in the user-interface. To keep one's settings synchronized with what shows
on the screen, the application, a Java based application, needs to be closed out and restarted. Hopefully this
is cleared up in a new release of the software.
We also noticed, that with certain operations in the GUI regarding networking or LUN configuration, the unit
will reset. So be sure you have quiesced your data before changing configurations.
In the end, the customer has decided to keep the unit and use if for secondary, non-critical storage.
Perhaps better use can obtained with the latest software releases.
The customer is probably going to go with EqualLogic as they are certified for use with VMWare ESX.
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