Thanks for the post!

I’m happy to have found an article about open-source storage on your blog. I’ve got to tell you that I recently purchased an IBM N3300 and spent a pretty penny on the software licensing for NFS, CIFS, etc… I’m glad I didn’t spend any money on the “Snap*” licenses though. I haven’t been impressed with the N-series. On the other hand, I spent an hour or two yesterday searching the internet for a free and open-source solution for NAS. I spent some time comparing FreeNAS and Openfiler and ultimately downloaded the later to have a peak. Wow, I am an hundred times more impressed with Openfiler vs. my N3300. There are a few quirks in Openfiler, but I wonder if it isn’t time for you to revisit this topic and see if we can generate some more conversation around who’s got the best-of-bread open-source NAS solution. FreeNAS vs Openfiler vs ???

Whether storage end-users are aware of it or not, much of the equipment from the big vendors sold over the last few years. This translates into more storage systems that can be monitored and (moving forward) managed via StorageIM using SMI-S.

1) Remote DMA (RDMA) for NFS. This enables creation of ethernet SAN NICs that offload both NFS and iSCSI similar to the way HBAs offload SCSI and FC today.
Linux project is at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nfs-rdma/
OpenSolaris at: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsrdma/

2) pNFS Enhancement to NFS that eliminates the restriction that an NFS filesystem must reside on a single server. Files can migrate and be replicated across NAS servers and clients can always find their data through a lookup servce. Creates a framework on NFS clients for an ‘NFS Volume Manager’ that lets clients replicate, stripe, mirror data across multiple NFS servers.
OpenSolaris project here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/
Linux project here: http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/asci/pnfs/linux/
My summary of pNFS at: http://storagethoughts.blogspot.com/2006/08/pnfs.html

I’m not sure if you have mentioned these other two before:

OpenNMS – http://www.opennms.org/index.php/Main_Page
Splunk – http://www.splunk.com/products/218

It is using MySQL as database to store all the files saved on the medium. If one need to restore a file, a virtual Filesystem is created and you can browse in it (coming from the database) until you find what you need to restore.
(nobody remembers the exact name of the file to restore, right…)

Overall it is pretty good system and can easy replace [put your major vendor tape arch. software here] without the licensing fees. Why not use the money for a better hardware instead of licenses.

Overall the OSS is here to stay and it will give the commercial software run for their money… Oh, wait the OSS is mostly free (as in Beer).

Also all the OSS projects are creating features based on what is requested/needed by the community, not based on marketing mambo-jumbo like – “Let’s leave this feature for the next version to make them upgrade” -> profit. Therefore the OSS software in most cases does a better job from an admin’s point of view.

Commercial support for most of the OSS is now largely available so there is nothing to fear about…