Anyone tested zetaVault?

L

Legen

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Looking to do a new SAN build and want to have the possibility for some more support than when using ordinary OmniOS. The SAN will host 30+ VMs.

Have anyone tried zetaVault (http://www.zeta.systems/zetavault/intro/)?

Their price is quite good, they are vmware and citrix verifier and they offer a HA solution.

Any one tried it :)?
 
A little heads up. It seems to be a very small operation. I wanted to evaluate the product (what they call the eval product is actually the free one, which is useless.) They refused to even deal with me, since I "was not a business, and we only deal with businesses!" The guy was extremely rude - he had no idea what I was actually doing, nor did he (seem to) care. Very odd - I've never run into a company who you have to beg them to take your money...
 
They are just a small VAR selling white box workstations and standard Supermicro servers. There are a number of other resellers who would be happy to take your money as Dan suggested. What kind of budget are you looking at, storage size and what level of availability and support do you need (I can make some more specific suggestions with more info)
 
danswartz said:
A little heads up. It seems to be a very small operation. I wanted to evaluate the product (what they call the eval product is actually the free one, which is useless.) They refused to even deal with me, since I "was not a business, and we only deal with businesses!" The guy was extremely rude - he had no idea what I was actually doing, nor did he (seem to) care. Very odd - I've never run into a company who you have to beg them to take your money...
Click to expand...

Ouch, does not sound like a good start or attitude towards potential customers!

mwroobel said:
They are just a small VAR selling white box workstations and standard Supermicro servers. There are a number of other resellers who would be happy to take your money as Dan suggested. What kind of budget are you looking at, storage size and what level of availability and support do you need (I can make some more specific suggestions with more info)
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply. All suggestions are welcome!

Our requirements,
Redundancy. At least one storage server (node) should be able to fail or go down for maintenance
Redundancy. At least two random disks should be able to fail
Shall at least perform 1000MByte/s in sequential write
Shall at least perform 1250MByte/s in sequential read
Shall at least perform 25000 random read 4k IOPS
Shall at least perform 20000 random write 4k IOPS
Shall provide at least 16TB of usable storage (would like 24TB if possible)
Shall work with Citrix Xenserver (We are currently using NFS so we know that better than iSCSI)
Should be expandable as our storage requirements increase
The solution shall offer a support contract (For when i need help investigating poor performance, stability etc etc)
Shall be cost effective (as always we are on a tight budget since we are a startup company)


Budget is about ~18 000 USD (does not include networking equipment, separate budget for that). I have done the requirements myself so if anything on there is "unreasonable" i will change it :)
 
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danswartz said:
A little heads up. It seems to be a very small operation. I wanted to evaluate the product (what they call the eval product is actually the free one, which is useless.) They refused to even deal with me, since I "was not a business, and we only deal with businesses!" The guy was extremely rude - he had no idea what I was actually doing, nor did he (seem to) care. Very odd - I've never run into a company who you have to beg them to take your money...
Click to expand...

That's not what happened.

You did a total of 7 installations of the software between March 2014 and March 2015. Each installation had 60 days evaluation.

You sent various e-mails to support but it was clear you were never going to purchase the software. Our standard trial period is 60 days and it does not take a year to decide if you are going to purchase our software.

At no time did you enquire to actually purchase the software, so your quote "to beg them to take your money" makes absolutely no sense.

We were nothing but courteous in our replies to you.

For the record, we provide a free edition to non-commerical customers.
 
Okay, since you are misrepresenting our interaction... I evaluated the software several times earlier, true. At the time, a major showstopper for me was that your product did not support ZFS in software raid mode. e.g. you needed to use a raid card and install zfs on top of that (eliminating one of the main points of using zfs). Much later (a couple of months ago), I happened to hear that was no longer the case, so I downloaded the latest ISO to try out, and was happy to see that wasn't the case. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, your 'evaluation' mode now seems to be just the free product, which has some major limitations, including no SAN support (not unreasonable in and of itself). Since the use-case involved iSCSI, this was a non-starter. I was in fact willing to pay for the commercial product, but you (or someone there) told me 'we only deal with businesses, and you are not one, so...' (paraphrasing here, but this was the sense of the reply I got.) As far as explicitly saying 'i want to buy your product', of course i didn't do that - that was the point of wanting to evaluate the full version. I note you are not addressing my assertion (which is demonstrably true) that the free version is feature limited (not unreasonable in itself), but given that I wanted to use features not supported by the free edition, this left me in a position where I would have had to buy the product without a chance to actually see and use said features. As far as being rude is concerned, you didn't actually insult me, true. You didn't reply to a couple of emails, and then started shifting the goal posts (nowhere I found on your site, does it say that you only deal with commercial entities.) Your site also describes the free edition as 'This is the default edition for the trial version.' I assumed from that phrasing there was a way to evaluate the commercial version, but was never given an answer to that question. I was interested in zetavault not just for myself, but for a small business I was consulting for. I pointed that out, but you didn't seem to care. Ironically, the reason I tried zetavault several times earlier was because I liked the interface so much, but just couldn't get past the limitation of having to install zfs in non-redundant mode on a single device. When I found that was no longer a limitation, I got seriously interested. Then, I found out I couldn't actually evaluate what I really wanted. That's when the problematic email chain got started. I have no problem with paying for commercial products, but buying something sight unseen is not something I'm willing to do (nor was my client). Maybe there is no way to evaluate the full (commercial) product, but you never told me this explicitly. If you had, I'd have shrugged and walked away disappointed, but respecting your position. As it was...
 
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Regardless of the two explanations of the event, it does take some stones to register to a tech board and refute a random story and then not even try and make peace. You aren't going to sell any software that way...

To give Zetavault a fair shake, tell us about your product and what makes it different from the other SAN-software solutions.
 
I have worked in customer facing situations in the past myself, and I would have had my head handed to me if I presented my company's image to customers/prospects the way zetavault does. Obviously he/she doesn't agree with my viewpoint, but to not even make an attempt to respond? If, for whatever reason, you think it's pointless to continue the discussion, walk away. Posting a snarky picture of a pot&kettle? Sophomoric and unprofessional....
 
We are not interested in entering into an endless flame war.

We are also not here to sell anything. Just to respond to Dan's grossly misrepresented experience with us.

If you want to see details on our product, just visit our site. I don't think this is the place for a vendor to spam people with marketing material.
 
Zetavault said:
We are not interested in entering into an endless flame war.

We are also not here to sell anything. Just to respond to Dan's grossly misrepresented experience with us.

If you want to see details on our product, just visit our site. I don't think this is the place for a vendor to spam people with marketing material.
Click to expand...

I do think you are proud on self claiming :p.
and treat the rest as nothing or lower :D.
 
Zetavault said:
We are not interested in entering into an endless flame war.

We are also not here to sell anything. Just to respond to Dan's grossly misrepresented experience with us.

If you want to see details on our product, just visit our site. I don't think this is the place for a vendor to spam people with marketing material.
Click to expand...



Then why even correct the initial comment? Google remembers all, and your attitude had been recorded for future google searches, and that WILL affect sales.
 
Zetavault said:
If you want to see details on our product, just visit our site. I don't think this is the place for a vendor to spam people with marketing material.
Click to expand...

Then toss away the marketing schpeal and level with us in straight up hardware/software terms. Tell us what makes your software so special that I'm willing to plunk down thousands on white box hardware with ZFS ontop when I can do the same thing with less costs running FreeNAS and a refurb'd Dell/HP server off ebay.

http://www.zeta.systems/zetavault/zfs-features/

What makes Zetafault different than FreeNAS? Your front end looks very familiar to me. Do you have the ability for plugins for backup software such as Bacula, BareOS, or BackupExec? What about containers? Docker Images? What's the Base OS underneath I think I see ZFS on Linux? Why should I try you instead of trying Microsoft Storage Spaces? Do you do pooling? Tiering?

Yes we all know about ZFS here, check the OpenIndiana thread and various permutations therein. Give us something that would make someone who IS storage and server knowledgeable WANT to try your product in a conversation that doesn't make our eyes roll out of our heads with gibberish marketing speak.

Hell give one of your engineers the login and let's speak to them.
 
danswartz said:
Okay, since you are misrepresenting our interaction... I evaluated the software several times earlier, true. At the time, a major showstopper for me was that your product did not support ZFS in software raid mode. e.g. you needed to use a raid card and install zfs on top of that (eliminating one of the main points of using zfs). Much later (a couple of months ago), I happened to hear that was no longer the case, so I downloaded the latest ISO to try out, and was happy to see that wasn't the case. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, your 'evaluation' mode now seems to be just the free product, which has some major limitations, including no SAN support (not unreasonable in and of itself). Since the use-case involved iSCSI, this was a non-starter. I was in fact willing to pay for the commercial product, but you (or someone there) told me 'we only deal with businesses, and you are not one, so...' (paraphrasing here, but this was the sense of the reply I got.) As far as explicitly saying 'i want to buy your product', of course i didn't do that - that was the point of wanting to evaluate the full version. I note you are not addressing my assertion (which is demonstrably true) that the free version is feature limited (not unreasonable in itself), but given that I wanted to use features not supported by the free edition, this left me in a position where I would have had to buy the product without a chance to actually see and use said features. As far as being rude is concerned, you didn't actually insult me, true. You didn't reply to a couple of emails, and then started shifting the goal posts (nowhere I found on your site, does it say that you only deal with commercial entities.) Your site also describes the free edition as 'This is the default edition for the trial version.' I assumed from that phrasing there was a way to evaluate the commercial version, but was never given an answer to that question. I was interested in zetavault not just for myself, but for a small business I was consulting for. I pointed that out, but you didn't seem to care. Ironically, the reason I tried zetavault several times earlier was because I liked the interface so much, but just couldn't get past the limitation of having to install zfs in non-redundant mode on a single device. When I found that was no longer a limitation, I got seriously interested. Then, I found out I couldn't actually evaluate what I really wanted. That's when the problematic email chain got started. I have no problem with paying for commercial products, but buying something sight unseen is not something I'm willing to do (nor was my client). Maybe there is no way to evaluate the full (commercial) product, but you never told me this explicitly. If you had, I'd have shrugged and walked away disappointed, but respecting your position. As it was...
Click to expand...



Not taking sides but paragraphs, please!
 
I haven't tested it, but I've seen other software that works very similarly. It's a very cool concept, if security and redundancy is handled correctly.
 
Bigdady92 said:
Then toss away the marketing schpeal and level with us in straight up hardware/software terms.

<snip>

Hell give one of your engineers the login and let's speak to them.
Click to expand...

Exactly! We're not necessarilly here to take sides, but stand up for your product and show us what we're missing!!
 
latest


I did not expect this hailstorm.

On-Topic: It looks like not so many have tried zetavault (no one :)). I will give it a try when our new supermicro server is ready to see how it performs against an ordinary OmniOS build (and maybe others if i find other alternatives in our price range)
 
Legen said:
latest


I did not expect this hailstorm.

On-Topic: It looks like not so many have tried zetavault (no one :)). I will give it a try when our new supermicro server is ready to see how it performs against an ordinary OmniOS build (and maybe others if i find other alternatives in our price range)
Click to expand...

they mention: ZFS on linux :D.

my lingering question and not answerd, what Linux distro as a based layer, and what version of ZoL. I am not care about GUI where every company can make splashy.

there are differences implementation on ZoL, just try to be aware, such ash smb implementation, and other low levels functionality that lives on linux kernel only.

if you lookk furher on the website, they do not tell briefly what is under the hood.
this is just say linux, ZFS on linux (what? ZoL?, or their on implementation)..
 
AFAIK, zetavault is based on ubuntu. The SAN implementation is SCST (IIRC - could be wrong.) I thought the OP was asking about SAN, so things like smb and nfs and such are not germane...
 
My recollection was pretty much the same thing. ZoL under the sheets, I think they are both built on ubuntu (if memory serves), both using SCST (again, IIRC).
 
True. On the other hand, quantastor's free edition supports most of the features you would need (e.g. not eliding SAN, etc...) For HA, both require extra $$$, you are correct. I have to say I like Zetavault's interface better - quantastor is really too complex for my taste. Even more annoying, they insist on using their own GUID-style names for pools, datasets, etc, at the CLI level. e.g. you might have a pool 'foo' with a dataset 'bar', but if you do 'zfs list', you will see something more like 'qs-dldfllfkglkglf/qs-4ikooi45oi45o4' or some-such. They have their own scripts to wrap all the low-level juju, but I found it a bit off-putting...
 
I can add to this...

The Zetavault implementation of regular ZFS on a single node is similar to QuantaStor.

Ubuntu+ZFS with a basic GUI to manage all aspects of the system.
In that mode, it's very affordable.

When Zetavault reworked its HA solution, I was intrigued because it differs from the dual-node with shared-SAS setup that you see with Nexenta/QuantaStor, etc. The idea is that each node can present its internal storage to the other over an infiniband SRP connection. The zpool is comprised of node1 (and its storage) mirrored with node2 (and its storage). It was surprisingly effective!

So you take a node down and 1/2 of your mirror vdev is gone. Bring it back online, and the pool resilvers. This also allows scale-out. So the Zetavault interface handles the virtual IP, pool ownership and cluster management. It's their own scripts, but I built a concept of this with their help on HP hardware and inexpensive 40Gb Infiniband gear ($200 in cards and cables... no Infiniband switch needed).

The issue was that I needed to support Fusion-io... And while technically possible, the Zetavault interface didn't allow me to add the /dev/fioX block devices because they hadn't planned for it...

At that point, Zetavault got rude and basically told me to eff-off with my obsolete equipment (because NVMe is supported, it made no sense to support my situation). They sent a few emails with personal attacks and accused me of wasting their time and free support (wasn't that the point of a proof-of-concept?).

I've bought Zetavault before for other small single-head installations, so the behavior from them was unacceptable. I even referred another organization to them after this incident, and my contact was turned-off by some of the Zetavault developer's behavior over email and telephone. Red-flag... so my contact killed the potential deal.

I'm desperate for a solution that does what they do with two nodes, but I can't bring myself to go back to Zetavault. I may roll-my-own using the Infiniband gear I already have.
 
Yeah, Zetavault and DNUK are a wreck from a business perspective. They could fill an open gap in ZFS HA solutions, but alas...
 
ewwhite said:
At that point, Zetavault got rude and basically told me to eff-off with my obsolete equipment (because NVMe is supported, it made no sense to support my situation). They sent a few emails with personal attacks and accused me of wasting their time and free support (wasn't that the point of a proof-of-concept?).
Click to expand...

This is 100% false.

At no time did we sell you to "eff-off".

At no time did we personally attack you.

I invite you to quote these "personal attacks". Please post them below.
 
Bigdady92 said:
I'm sure he'll get to it in the same amount of time it's taken you to answer my post here:

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041685820&postcount=14

Priorities of course...
Click to expand...

OK.

Our niche is really building ZFS from clusters of commodity systems using their internal storage over a switched InfiniBand network. Next year the 100 Gigabit Intel Omni-Path interconnect will be supported.

i.e. the ZFS storage pool(s) are built from the internal storage of the nodes.

This is very different to the shared SAS architecture the other ZFS vendors use.

You can start with 2 nodes or build ZFS systems from entire racks of servers.

I'm not aware of any other ZFS vendors using this approach. That's what makes us unique. Until another vendor copies it.
 
Zetavault said:
This is 100% false.

At no time did we sell you to "eff-off".

At no time did we personally attack you.

I invite you to quote these "personal attacks". Please post them below.
Click to expand...

Okay, I'll bite...

I gave a fair assessment of your product offering in this post. I was not disappointed with Zetavault performance, support or pricing.

The breakdown came in communication... They didn't wish to engage over telephone, so my questions about the product played out in long email threads. Response time was good, but this was inefficient compared to a nice conference call to hash out details.

A month into the proof-of-concept, the main requirement I requested for my environment (Fusion-io support), was dismissed as "obsolete" and I was told that it

Post-installation discussion with my feedback and questions about the Zetascale HA implementation:
5y1cPUV.png


With the help of support, I was able to compile-in the requisite drivers for my 1.2TB Fusion-io cards.
X52yhLx.png


Okay, I can understand limited GUI support for a one-off or non-standard request. That was fine, so I kept working with the software until I ran into a device discovery issue. The OS saw the Fusion-io adapters, but the Zetavault software could not. So I provided some additional feedback.
2ArI0f3.png


At the time, I did not understand the implications of NVMe over PCIe. I even created a post on ServerFault to get some color on the topic, since I wasn't sure if the standard was fully adopted and what the hardware limitations were. I was met with this response:
HyOtRrr.png


SsOWVV9.png


So, in the end, the interaction turned unprofessional very quickly. I'd worked on this proof-of-concept for over a month, acquiring hardware, Infiniband components and stepping through the installation. I was working with four $8,000 1.2TB Fusion-io cards and serious about making them work in this context.

To be told, "this concludes your evaluation", so abruptly and with such derision, the Zetavault business practices are just poor. I was an existing paying customer! I wasn't wasting time, nor was I doing this with the intent of not buying. If I was told that Fusion-io would not be supported at the outset, I would have found another way or explored NVMe earlier.

Final correspondence.
MBh6j.png


I still think their product is unique in the ZFS appliance marketplace.
I referred another organization to Zetavault later in the year, despite my poor experience. That organization also had a bad encounter with the Zetavault folks, finally saying:

1iiIM.png


So, that's the summary of my experiences...
 
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Hello Edmund

I don't see any "personal attacks" in those e-mails you posted.

You did a total of 7 installations from Feb 2014 to Feb 2015.

With each evaluation being 60 days, that is a total of 14 months evaluating our product.

You say you were a "paying customer". None of the 7 installation licenses were purchased. All expired after 60 days.

We spent over a year providing you with free support. A sarcastic reply to our support never goes down well.

Here's the bottom line. We are a business and we are in the business of selling software [1].

We spend up to a year providing unpaid support to potential customers.

It just sounds like you were looking to roll your own solution and wanted us to help you.

The storage market is incredibly crowded. If our business practices were as poor as you say, we wouldn't be in business. We've been trading since June 1996 so we must be doing something right.

[1] except for our free edition, which we give away to non-commercial users.
 
My clients have purchased licensed Zetavault under my direction. Single-node installations have installed and gone fine without incident. This proof-of-concept was initiated by you because you wanted to show us the new HA functionality in Zetavault. We were excited by the prospect.

ssoLNK9.png


I wouldn't give this particular client the clear to convert their existing license to the HA Zetascale until I could test the solution. You proceeded to guide me step-by-step on what I needed to make the HA solution work: Specific parts to buy (as I was not familiar with Infiniband) and other requirements needed to get a functional setup. The email thread in my earlier post starts after I'd acquired all of the new equipment and performed the initial installations using your HA licenses.

szl9n7f.png
 
I'm familiar with that particular evaluation. It took place from November 2014 into 2015.

The license was not purchased after the evaluation concluded.
 
update June 2017. The product looks cool but it's too bad because it was the worst experience dealing with any company ever! I think the problem is the owner Dave or that's when things went sideways for me. I would stay away because I don't think they will be around long term. You can't treat people the way they do and continue to thrive.
 
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