technical solutions and commentary

Here are some OpenSource NAS/SAN software pacakages that let you turn standard hardware into a NAS/SAN type device. These should work great in lab environments for testing software integration with NAS/SAN services. I have not used these in production, and do not recommend it.

• Openfiler allows you to build a NAS and/or SAN appliance, using standard hardware in less than 10 minutes. OpenFiler combines Apache, Samba, LVM2, ext3, Linux NFS and iSCSI Enterprise Target into a small, easy to manage with a web-based management interface.

• FreeNAS supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC protocols, local user authentication, software RAID (0,1,5) with a web based configuration interface.