I have been looking at Openfiler, and it appears to be a great open-source solution. I haven't seen very much documentation on limitations of OF. We are by no means a Fortune 500 company (yet:) so our current budget is rather minimal, but none the less I would like to hear your opinions!
Our storage server consists of 6TB (12 x 500GB), AMD 2.4 (2x), 8GB RAM and the purpose will be to serve as our VMWare storage. The VMs will consist of web servers, QB servers, and possibly small-scale mail will be run off our blade environment.
Just wanted hear your thoughts since I don't have any experience other than with Dell's SAN management software.
Answer
FreeBSD 8.2, running ZFS. ZFS includes the following out of the box:
- Supports NFS & iSCSI out of the box.
- ZFS includes Snapshots, data checksums, multiple copies, filesystem compression
- RAID-Z - Similar to RAID-5, but without the RAID-5 write hole. All disk writes are atomic copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is never inconsistent (No need to FSCK after a power outage!).
- Double-parity RAID-Z2 (e.g. RAID-6, but without the write hole)
- (soon) data deduplication
- There is no need for an expensive RAID controller, so you can drop that layer of complexity.
Read more about the benefits of ZFS in this short summary at http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/whatis .
FreeBSD is a very solid operating system, and ZFS is surprisingly easy to learn and use.
This solution is free. There's no cost. There are a couple additional packaged products which are similar:
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