Isilon - Who's using it?

kdh

Gawd
Joined
Mar 16, 2005
Messages
806
Recently set up a 5 node cluster. Most flawless piece of hardware I've ever setup. Still waiting for it to punch me in the face with some weird gotcha.

Anyone else using it?
 
Recently set up a 5 node cluster. Most flawless piece of hardware I've ever setup. Still waiting for it to punch me in the face with some weird gotcha.

Anyone else using it?

they are pretty rock solid!
 
All of our Isilon customers love it. I can't wait until they figure out the small I/O issues, vSphere has pNFS, and Unicorns roam the Earth. The stuff on the roadmap coming is very cool.
 
We have close to 12 petabytes of storage last I checked. Works amazingly well till a fucking retarded program manager walks down and pulls drives out cause "they were blinking"
 
I have been trying to get on the website for a while now but get

Sorry, 195.12.225.148 has been banned.

Its not even my IP!
 
We have close to 12 petabytes of storage last I checked. Works amazingly well till a fucking retarded program manager walks down and pulls drives out cause "they were blinking"

i call bullshit..

if you can afford 12petabytes of storage.. it aint just sitting some place where some dipshit can pull the drives out..

if it is true.. program manager hopefully found a new excuse to redo his resume.
 
All of our Isilon customers love it. I can't wait until they figure out the small I/O issues, vSphere has pNFS, and Unicorns roam the Earth. The stuff on the roadmap coming is very cool.

oh snap.

do tell.

I am currently using it to span various security network domains to eliminate sftp/scp jobs and have stuff mounted via nfs. All communication between nodes is done via the infiniband switch. Most files that'll be moving to this storage will be small files, processed, and then deleted.

so far my only grip and its so minor are the chumpy rail kits that came with the infiniband switches.
 
i call bullshit..

if you can afford 12petabytes of storage.. it aint just sitting some place where some dipshit can pull the drives out..

if it is true.. program manager hopefully found a new excuse to redo his resume.

this. was about to post the same.

bullshit, or the most idiotic IT staff in the history of IT
 
I spent a lot of time over the last few days locking things down on my 5 node cluster so only certain hosts can ssh into it, and certain hosts can hit the web gui. Support didn't seem to mind. Anyone interested in seeing how to do it?
 
I will doing a vplex geo and metro install in the coming months. very excited about it.

working on a vmax2 install and part of the eap program so i cant talk about it much. ;)
 
I will explain that story a bit more lol. Due to the large amount of equipment we have been buying, we got a bunch of training thrown in on top of the purchase. The day the staff was due to go down for training, this pm informed us that since he was the "supervisior" and the director was out of office, him and two of the Linux admins were going to the training and that he had cancelled the trip for the rest of us.

Now knowing this guy, the rest of us just rolled our eyes and laughed. and planned to leave early that day. The next day the admins and pm came back bragging about how they were now certified storage experts and they were looking to get deeper into this system. One of the network engineers here asked how the test was and the pm responded with and I quote " We didnt take the test since it was stupid."

The very next day this guy goes down to the server/storage farm with one of the other "certified storage experts" and proceeded to pull out 8 or so drives out of two or three head units because they had gotten alarms of a failed drive, yet did not bother to do any more investigation. They pulled out all of the drives that were "blinking" causing a loss of all our raw movies slated for encoding.

And they both still work here. I should point out that this was the same time I transferred to another department because of things like this. I am trying to get a bunch more experience and certs just to get away from here but you know how that goes when life tries to intervene.
 
And yes things really are that bad in certain departments here. Just glad I have a job that pays better than most of the jobs here in Wyoming.
 
Thanks for the clarification. Time to put doors on your racks, lock them, and hide the key some place. ;)

You mentioned Media encoding.. Are you accessing your Isilon cluster from a Mac and or Ipads?

Currently right now, I'm using NFS shares between most hosts to get rid of the various sftp jobs we have to cut down on the generic system accounts.

I'm asking about Mac, because I can see this cluster growing arms and legs and taking over our large fileshares that both our windows folks and mac folks access at the same time. I see the appeal of Ipads, and I know they are great for note taking, and would like to see if you are using them to access your isilon cluster.

as i type this, i'm currently rolling out Vormetic as well for file encryption on our shared isilon nodes. Neat stuff.
 
Last edited:
All experiences are welcome :). I delayed an Isilon training in favor of VPLEX but I'm keeping an eye on it.

I'll post up stuff here in a bit. Honestly, I'm doing really bare bones Isilon stuff. I have a very complicated network backend, but the storage part is cake. I honestly learned everything I needed to know by having my installer sit with me for about 3 hours and just go over the things I plan to do. A class would have been a waste for me. Honestly, the support ticket system is great, and the online doco is done really well. It just really "clicked" for me. The gui is really all you need.
 
No, this media encoding is for taking the raw, uncompressed video file and transcoding it to an appropriate resolution/bitrate suitable for satellite tv or tv over ip.

The access to the cluster is pretty locked down for us, limited mainly to the transcoding/encoding farms. We have also been testing it out as the storage for our vmware cluster storage. We had rolled out a new cluster to test our CMS system but serving out the amount of movies that get requested by our customers forced us to also move them to Akamai.
 
I have a side project I'm working in my personal time.. Are you guys doing a lot with ffmpeg?

I'm have my isilon cluster completely setup and locked down with vormetic.. Crazy easy.. Stupidly Secure.
 
Back
Top