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Purchasing Used High-End Storage Arrays?
sphealey asks: "I have an opportunity to purchase a used disk storage array in the terabyte class (which we need) originally manufactured by a leading vendor. The price is reasonable, and the seller is offering to provide installation and a 90-day warranty with the system. The unit appears to be complete and functioning. My question is, what are the pitfalls? And which are likely to occur?
"What I have considered so far:
- Original vendor charges outrageous fee to license necessary client-side software.
- Original vendor charges 're-entry fee' of some sort to place unit back on maintenance and support.
- Shipping and installation nightmares are worse than the usual for this class of equipment, and there is no original vendor to turn to for assistance.
same as with any used equipment.
If you've never bought anything used then I suggest you don't start with something of this magnitude.
If you have, then surely you're aware of the pitfalls.
close the <i> tag</I>
Do not let the college kid intern give his friends accounts on a machine that can mount this volume so that they can run gnutella clients. Your terabytes of space will be filled with mp3's, pirated iso's of games, every episode of Star Trek X Files Simpsons and Seinfeld and Lexx and etc. ever broadcast, within days. Those guys will fill your space at a rate which can be calculated from the size of your internet pipe. They will go out and rent DVDs just to copy them to your space so they can re-download them everytime they want to watch it, screwing your bandwidth bill.
Don't ask how I know this. And no, I just deleted it all, so you can't look in there and poke around and see if they have any porn.
Word to the wise.
For example, HP sells rebranded Metastor arrays (from LSI I think) but they cleverly replace the firmware with their own wonky HP load.
This doesn't do anything good for the customer, in that it actually decreases the amount of control you have over the array.
But it does something cool for the vendor (HP that is) because without the HP firmware the Metastor won't work perfectly with the (proprietary, closed-source) HP-UX disk management and monitoring utilities.
Unscrupulous installers of non-HP Metastor arrays will turn off disk and fiber channel monitoring in HP-UX so as to prevent generating false errors... this also prevents detection of real errors, how 'bout that.
Be wary, and get a written guarantee of compatibility up front if you can.
IIRC, a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. 100 GB drives are available, so terabyte array really is not very big.
Make sure you know how the price compares with a new solution to the problem you have... just because it's a fraction of its original price doesn't mean it's a good deal.
EMC, then you're in trouble. EMC charges for the software like you mentioned, for both the Clariion and Symmetrix. That is how they make their money. And technically, if you have the opportunity to buy a used Sym, then it is a semi-illegal sale, since EMC is the only authorized person to resell a Sym. Once you buy it, you're stuck with it.
Sun stuff is pretty good - all of the necessary software to use the array on a direct connect basis is available in the box. It's not pretty, but it works. You can config it using RaidUtil.
HP would probably lean towards the EMC model more than the Sun model. Software is their big push. You might be able to get it config'd on a direct attached basis, but dunno about in a SAN w/o appropriate software.
Compaq is the same as HP, but their stuff isn't as good.
Netapp? They seem to be the most user-friendly when it comes to used equip.
Just my $0.02.
Did you win this auction?e m& item=1292583082
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt
If so - hela-good deal. If you aren't doing video, I'd scrap Sangery and go direct attached instead.
Pitfalls? Things like to die in shipping, but if you get the 90 day warranty you should be covered. After that, it's a question of support. What will RMAs cost you? What will it cost you to get help over the phone or e-mail? What would an on-site visit cost you if you needed one? etc. If you haven't dealt with such a bit of hardware before, vendor support could make a big difference in PITA factor, and cost. Good luck.
There are three sets of possible issues you might encounter: Hardware, Software, and Compatibility. It looks like you've considered some of the software issues, though I'm not sure you've considered the harware or compatibility issues yet.
Hardware issues probably center around reliability, more than anything. If you're purchasing a 3 year old disk array which received constant use, then you can expect that you WILL encounter hardware issues - if not now, sometime during its useful life. You might just encounter a bad disk, or there may be larger problems (like with the head unit). I've seen NetApps which are only a few WEEKS old lose disks (not much EMC experience here).
You may need/want to update firmware or patch the internal OS of the unit. Be warned that you may need to purchase some sort of support contract to get patches and updates. Also, hardware like this is notoriously touchy about being moved - so once you get it set up, don't tear it down and set it up somewhere else, unless you're prepared to fight with it.
Finally, compatibility issues may arise. I've noticed that NetApps in particular are very touchy when using Linux NFS clients - very often the clients will need to be rebooted when they hang. I think this is more of a Linux NFS client code issue than a NetApp issue (Linux NFS is *slowly* getting better), but its something to keep in mind. Without knowing what hardware you are going to purchase, it's very difficult to tell you what to look out for, but my primary experience has been with NetApp (fairly reliable, and a huge pain to work with in a cross platform environment) and a little EMC (nifty, a little faster, and a lot more expensive).