Hi Martin,
Sounds familiar. I'm assuming you still had the management NIC connected on the Infortrend controllers? We've been running fine without the management NIC connected (instead using the serial port management). No controller crashes, performance is stellar, etc. Obviously a "major" problem though, not to have monitoring of the device.
It's obvious that Infortrend could care less about this problem, which amazes me, since I suspect a large customer population uses ESX with their equipment.
Good idea to order the NetApps. SCSI Reservations aren't the worst thing in the world, if implemented properly (most haven't been in the past). NFS does make it easier to manage by using a lock file instead of some hidden reservation that is unmanageable, and has no statistical measure.
If you still have the Infortrends, I suspect you'll be fine with them without the management port connected. Would be good for backup/archive storage.
We have had no issues with our NEC D4 either, which just sits there and runs flawlessly, as do our IBM DS3400 units (with the latest firmware, I should add...). Although, the DS3400 has a common problem where if a management port is connected to a switch that fails or the port on the switch fails, the management port becomes non-functional on the DS3400. It's a known problem that hasn't been correct by LSI Logic. Ugh.
We also had issues with our old MSA1500cs series SANs... a common problem that HP claims they couldn't reproduce (surprise surprise) where the controllers would lock up after a period of time. Complaints rolled in about the issue, and only last year did they release a firmware that, in theory, fixes the problem. We have only been running on this latest firmware for a couple weeks, so we don't have enough time on them to prove it's fixed.
I just amazes me, though, that companies (large, popular ones) can produce junk equipment and fail to fix problems.
And it doesn't seem to matter how small or large the SAN company is. Hitachi had numerous problems with their flagship products for a long time. Thankfully most of those have been resolved, but still... amazing that you can spend millions on equipment that doesn't work.
Now if only we can get past this lousy 2TB limit in products nowadays. 
As crazy as it sounds that this is too small... we often run into this limit and using extents or OS-level spanning, gets to be more and more of a pain. Filesystems in general have become the biggest nuisance.
Eric
Not that Infortrend really deserves this, but I thought I should add that a customer of ours, who has one of these units, says that with the latest firmware on the S16F-R1840, the issues that we experienced have been resolved. They have had the firmware running for 2 months without issues.
Just wanted to let everyone know, in case someone else is going nuts with problems and needs a resolution.
Eric
