Anyone here use Openfiler? : http://www.openfiler.com/

I've been labbing VMware / vCenter / vMotion just to balance my skills (primary experience is with HyperV and clustering) and I needed something to use as a shared storage device without reconfiguring one of our Synology boxes and I came across this. Essentially you install it on a server/PC/laptop/VM whatever (it has its own Linux based OS), and it allows you to configure the harddisks in the machine as volumes and LUNS and preset them to other machines via NFS/iSCSI etc... Unbelievably simple to configure (all via web browser) and I have to admit its been pretty much bullet proof. I've failed it over, turned it off, bounced it a thousand times etc... but not once have I had to log on to the box to do anything. Its always just come straight back online and the hosts just connect straight away flawlessly. Its free to use for the large part, except for the replication module which is 2400 euro's (start price). This is incredible value though when you consider this gives you a full DR site failover capability - I mean businesses spend millions achieiving that....

I'm sure it doesn't stand up next to enterprise class storage solutions, but damn its useful and I'd seriously consider it as a great solution for smaller businesses. There's also the obviously wonderful ability to turn an ancient PC into a NAS, but you'd probably already be using FREENAS for that....

Excuse my ignorance but what does this offer over FreeNAS?

Not huge amounts - they're pretty close competitors. It has got some better suitability for business use - From geekyprojects.com:

OpenFiler

Pros

1) Better hardware compatibility.

2) Better SMB transfer speed. Openfiler is built on Linux which has a better SMB implementation than FreeBSD.

3) Better Active Directory support. AD support is definitely more advanced in Linux than in FreeBSD.

4) DRBD Support.

4) DRBD Support.

So I had to google this one, but looks like this is quite a big one in terms of redundancy?? And I think I'm right in thinking that if you had two computers you could pair them over the network?

Is this possible without the £1000s add ons?

There are some guides out there which amount to pretty much frigging it but I haven't tried it. Probably not bad if you wanted to use it at home if you could get it working.

From a business perspecitive the bolt on is a damn good price for that level of DR capability.