Shortcomings of OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris, while a great platform for a storage system does lack some features that we consider necessary for a dedicated storage array.  One thing that never worked quite right was the LED's on the front of the chassis.  It was very difficult to know which drive was which after they were installed.  The drive names shown in the operating system do not correspond with the physical drives in any consistent way.  This would make troubleshooting a drive failure very difficult, as you'd not know which drive was which drive.  Ideally, a red LED should come on beside the failed drive so it will be easy for a tech to quickly swap the correct drive.

Another shortcoming was the lack of a built-in Web GUI.  The Promise system comes with a web interface to create, destroy, and manage logical volumes.  OpenSolaris has no such interface.  It's all done via command line controls.  Granted once you've become familiar with those command line tools, it's not terrible to set up and destroy volumes, but it'd be nice to have a GUI that allowed you the same control while making it easier for first-timers to manage the system.

The last and possibly most important shortcoming of OpenSolaris is the lack of an automatic notification system if there is a failure.  No email goes out to page a system administrator if a drive dies, so when the system has a drive failure you may never know that a drive has failed.  This presents a very clear danger for usage in the datacenter environment, because most of us just expect to be notified if there is a problem.  The Promise solution does this very well and all you have to do is put in an SMTP server address and an email address to send the notification messages to.

All of these can be solved with custom scripting within OpenSolaris.  An even easier solution is to simply use Nexenta.  They already have the LED's and notifications figured out.  It's a very simple to get Nexenta configured to notify you of any failures. 

Another solution is to buy third-party LED/FMA code.   We have tried the SANtools package and it seems to work pretty well for enabling LED's, but there is still some work to be done before it is as easy as Nexenta.  If you use the code from SANtools to control the LED’s, you will still need to write some scripts to polls FMA and send notifications and launch the SANtools script to control the LED’s.  You can find the SANtools software here:

While this is very possible to script all of this with FMA, I'm not interested in re-inventing the wheel.  Until someone comes up with this code and contributes it into the OpenSolaris project, it is simply not practical for most people to use OpenSolaris directly.  OpenSolaris should have code built into the core for notifying the system administrator and for shining the LED on the correct drive.