SNS iSCSI Initiator is Now Free

[Shane Sokolosky]

Yes, Good to hear some feedback Sean!

Shane Sokolosky
Technician
Studio Network Solutions

Email – shanesky@SNSla.com
Phone – (714) 599-1611

[Sean Oneil]

Yeah I just switched over to it from the ATTO initiator. So far its working out much better.

Sean

[Donk270]

I currently use the ATTO initiator and am pleased thus far with functionality. I’d be interested in switching now that the SNS is free though, but am wondering what you see as being better about the SNS, Sean, seeing as how you’ve had experience with both. Don’t want to switch for nothing, you know? Thanks.

[Sean Oneil]

I use MetaSAN for our iSCSI SAN. I’ll get to that in a second.

First and foremost. XtendSAN won’t work with targets over 2TB. Any target over 2TB will show up as being only 2TB to Mac OSX. The SNS initiator doesn’t have this limitation.

As far as speed goes without MetaSAN installed, the ATTO works fine. But, the SNS tests a little faster with my target for some reason (Open-E iSCSI Enterprise). I get a 105MB/s up and down with it, which is pretty much wire speed. Was getting about 95MB/s with ATTO. Not a big difference, but the fact is that the ATTO tests are less than wire-speed means there’s some kind of bottleneck there that shouldn’t be.

Now with MetaSAN installed. I’m having a strange compatibility problem with iSCSI since I updated to the latest version. Write speed is severely crippled on all members except the metadata master. Tiger has great support and they’re working on it. The point is though, that the problem is MUCH less severe when I switched from ATTO to SNS. Not sure why. And it could be a unique issue with my target.

One thing I hate about XtendSAN is that its very user-unfriendly. After a year, the other editors still couldn’t understand how to connect to the target on the rare occasion they had to and I wasn’t around. The layout is extremely confusing and weird, as I’m sure you noticed. The SNS GUI makes much more sense and is easier to use. It’s also looks a lot nicer :).

With SNS the persistent target drives mount quickly and 100% of the time after a system restart. This was not the case with XtendSAN. Occasionally it wouldn’t connect to the target automatically after a restart. I guess it would timeout too quickly. It’s very rare, but it happened nonetheless. And the fact that it mounts slower actually amplifies one of the known issues with MetaSAN. We usually had to refresh the Finder after every restart because it took too long to connect. Since switching to SNS initiator I haven’t had to do this once.

I also like the fact that SNS has all kinds of documentation online and even a user forum. The Atto website is absolutely terrible in and of itself. And the resources for XtendSAN are even worse. There’s no documentation, no release notes, no message board, no version updates – nothing. You go there and you feel like XtendSAN was made by some hobbyist programmer who forgot about it a long time ago.

All these problems could be unique to me because I’m using Open-E and MetaSAN. So who knows. But for my SAN, the SNS is much better.

And to be fair, the actual people at ATTO are great. Every time I’ve had to call they’ve been really nice and helpful. And their product does work, and I used it successfully for a long time. But it’s time to move on to something that’s not only better, but free.

Sean