Open Source FreeNAS Project
The Storage Forum provides a brief review of the open source FreeNAS project. FreeNAS is a small (less than 16MB) operating system based on FreeBSD 6 that provides free Network-Attached Storage services: CIFS, FTP and NFS.
The money quote:
Testing I did in my lab with FreeNAS on a high end Xeon with SATA disks simply screamed. There’s just no other way to describe it. I ran my throughput tests five times before I was sure I hadn’t made some fundamental mistake with the math. I saw $75k performance from a $5k box running a beta NAS software platform.
[bolding added]
Help Keep Vendors Working For Your Business
Open source software is exerting enormous pressure on commercial vendors to keep innovating technically and commercially. Look at the progress Microsoft has made with Windows Server, scaling it up to compete Apache and Linux, and compare that to the glacial pace of Internet Explorer until Firefox came along. Vendors are businesses - if they don’t have a business reason to invest they won’t.
Which is why open source storage is so important. Whether it is FreeNAS or ZFS, open source can either drive cost out of commercial products or force them to improve. There is a business case that any company with an IT budget over $1 million a year should set aside 2% for investing in and supporting the open source alternative to their most important platform. This 2% For Open investment will pay for itself in lower products costs, improved functionality and a stronger bargaining position.
Lend A Hand
Those of you with technical skills might want to help. And those of you who supply low-end NAS to clients might want to look at using it - and helping.
on August 11th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
Hi Robin,
thanks for the link to my web site TheStroageForum.COM and the review I did on FreeNAS.
Love your line “The money quote”, thats cute
Stay tuned as I’ll be running a follow up series of reveiws and tests on related open source storage solutions, and platforms, with the aim to running a monthly detailed hands on audit and review of all and any NAS platform, open source or not, that I can get my hands on.
Love your site and again thanks for picking up my article.
Let’s share cross links
Cheers,
Dez
http://TheStorageForum.COM
http://WebSearch.COM.AU
http://CradleTechnologies.COM
http://www.Blanchfield.COM.AU
on January 16th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I have been using FreeNAS for quite some time and I am a really big fan. In fact, I have made FreeNAS one of the focuses of my blog Daily Cup of Tech (http://www.DailyCupOfTech.com).
One of the things that really impresses me about FreeNAS is the fact that this free OS can be up and running in a matter of minutes, opening you up to the ability to store file on the system using Windows, FTP, RSYNC, and more! And it only takes up 32 MB on the disk!
I have written a number of articles about FreeNAS. A lot of it is about how to set up and configure the system to work with your Windows network. All of the articles can be found at http://www.dailycupoftech.com/category/freenas/. I hope you find them to be useful.
Tim