(i)SCSI. The name says it all.

August 1, 2009 5:48 AM

Wasabi Storage Builder iSCSI SAN. Defunct? Serviceable? Replaceable? Hopeless?

I inherited an iSCSI SAN using Wasabi Storage Builder with little to no documentation. From the looks of that website, they're defunct. So I can't even find a manual for this thing. I am new to SANs in general (though i've read this) but I understand the fundamentals after playing around with it enough.

We mount the iSCSI targets in win server 2k3 iSCSI initiator. This works mostly fine, except for how somehow one target lost its windows volumes, and now shows up as unpartitioned space in disk management.

There seems to be some method by which mounting 1 iscsi target disk automatically mounts 1 or 2 others in the same "disk pool". We've discovered no consistency in this between machines. Furthermore, the disk label and drive letter are always mounted the same, regardless of which machine they're mounted on, so that would again point to some pre-configuration on the iSCSI side, before it even is discovered by windows.

Finally, assuming I restore my shares in windows, I am thinking of replacing this wasabi software on the SAN with something else that would provide similar functionality but come from a vendor with SUPPORT.

What I'm looking for here: Thoughts about my conundrum? A pdf of the manual? An online or dead tree resource that explains it all? A guru in the NYC area that has done this many times before and would be willing to help out a midsize non-for-profit org?

I'd be glad for any ideas / suggestions the hive has.

posted by slagerst to technology (3 comments total)

Did you see this?

Looks like it'd be better used as a doorstop. Sorry, that really sucks. Makes it much harder for other companies to get into the market. If you have the ability, you might crack it open to see what's inside and see if you can get Linux or BSD to run on the computer hardware in a way that'll make the volumes mountable and might provide access to the data... you'd lose the performance gains from the optimized kernel, but at least you'd be able to read it.

Next time, buy something from a major vendor. Or just buy raw storage and implement the transport yourself.
posted by SpecialK at 12:51 PM on August 1

I don't personally know much about the hardware, so I won't be any help there. But a very close friend of mine is a tech for a company that sells/installs storage systems mainly to the AV market.

As luck would have it, we went out for pizza last night and he was telling me that at least one of his company's products was based on Wasabi hardware and that they definitely did go out of business. He also said that he'd heard another company bought whatever was left of them, so it's possible that the new company will offer support.
posted by tomwheeler at 12:58 PM on August 1

I would echo SpecialK - run away from storing all your data on a device that isn't supported any more. The one good thing is that if it's a standardish NetBSD box you may be able to get some local help.
posted by rodgerd at 3:11 PM on August 1