blog.noetech.com

Continuing Apple Xsan Support Issues

After my post yesterday I received a message my SE manager and a conference call was setup with all the SEs assigned to us and Bill Hudson from Cupertino. The call lasted about a half hour where they continued to insist the problem is that we are hosting too many volumes, though no one can offer up any documentation from Apple saying that they don't support our config.

Also, after explaining our exact problem (MDC becomes unresponsive but volumes don't fail-over) for the hundredth time, it seemed like they finally got it. It's not that the server crashes and the volumes fail-over, if it did that, I could live with it. So maybe some progress there.

I've sent over cvgather tar balls for every volume and their engineers are supposed to be looking at them to see if there's something wrong beyond the number of volumes. Though I've heard that several times before. I was supposed to receive an update today, but haven't as of 6pm.

To be honest I think that's the most frustration thing, the promises that they aren't keeping. I was told at least a month ago that engineers where going to look at our problem, but they never did. I've been told I'll get call backs and updates and never have. At least call me back and let me know that it's being looked into.

On the call I explained how I felt like we have a problem that they can't solve and their trying to blame us, which is not an uncommon support tactic. I've asked several times for them to say exactly what about our setup is not supported, and to back it up with documentation. "For best performance" doesn't count in my book. In fact, it implies to me that the other way is supported, it just won't support as many streams, not an issue for us at all.

Pissed over here, but lets see if I get some news by Monday.

Apple Xsan

In the past I've written about the Xsan in a very positive way. While I still think it's a great product, Apple's support for it is less then stellar.

A few months ago we started having a problem where the MDC would lockup and become completely unresponsive every 10 to 24 hours. What's strange is that all the volumes stay mounted and working on the clients, but you can't log into the MDC to administer it, and they only way to fix it is to force reboot the server, which puts all of our volumes at risk. The server can't be reached via SSH or telnet either, completely dead in the water. It's just really annoying, but we've managed to work around it without too much interference.

We've been working with our Apple SEs for some time trying figure out what's happening, but we haven't had any luck figuring it out. We've added more RAM, tried other servers, lowered the amount of volumes, etc. What we're being told is that the system doesn't support the number volumes we have and the way they were setup. Of course these same SEs where here when we laid-out how we were going to configure it. And as far as I can tell from the documentation, there's nothing that we are doing that's wrong. There are ways to set it up to make it run faster, but we're doing all low res work and barely taxing the system at all.

Since the SEs wanted to wipe and rebuild the whole thing, which would take a couple of days of copying media, not to mention the risk of it failing, I decided to contact Apple Enterprise support, even though we don't have a support contract.

Turns out they don't sell per incident for the Xsan and the only way to get support is to pay 14k. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. The entire system, including the hardware, was less then 6 months old when the problem started, there's no way we're paying 17% of the original system cost for a support contract. Just not going to happen.

Avid assurance for their Unity system is nowhere close to that expensive. And to be honest, I can't understand how Apple doesn't want to figure this out. If for no other reason, so they can answer these questions in the future. But preferable because we're a pretty big customer in an industry that they want to get into. My Apple contacts spend a lot of time trying to convince me that WOW needs to be on FCP, but how can they expect anyone who depends on software and hardware to run their business to go down their path when they can't get reasonable support.

Say what you want about Avid's costs, their support is pretty damn good compared.

Don't get me wrong, my SEs are doing the best they can to help us out, but their options are limited, and I'm reluctant to take their advice about wiping the whole thing when no one has actually looked at it first. What I want is someone high in Apple support to take a look at our logs, ask us a few questions and help us figure out what exactly is happening. If it turns out we have to wipe it and start over, fine, but look at it first please. And do it for less then 14k.

We had requested a quote for more storage, but until this gets worked out those plans are on hold. We'll use local storage instead, at least that doesn't go down every 24 hours.