Quote Originally Posted by budy
Hold your horses… - I'd say. I am working as an admin in a midsized ads agency and we're running the complete Apple stack. I am using Open-E to provide my Xserves and Parallels VMs iSCSI devices that they then can share out (or do something else with them). Plus setting up volume replication with Open-E is as easy as ut can possibly get - try that with OpenFilerm where you will have to setup the drdb config on your own.

I checked CentOS, OpenFiler and FreeNAS and they all don't compete against Open-E, especially when it comes to speed and ease of use.
I myself wouldn't go for the USB thingy as well, but more due to the fact that my old Dell PE's and FSC Primergys won't boot from them and that the GUI tends to be so slow.
So I decided to go with Atlanta, which I simply installed on the local hard drives. The speed of the GUI is much snappier this way, and I never had a problem with the filesystem as well.

You can get the same performance out of Debian or any other Linux Distro, if you agree to get down and patch your kernel, thus enabeling the better performance modes of SCST, which is actually why Open-E is superior in speed in comparison with all ietd based solutions, which are of course easier to deploy.

I think that Open-E give you the most bang for the buck.

Just my 2c,
budy
I'm talking about NAS part of the product with AFP protocol not ISCSI connect over virtual machine and share over it ,about ISCSI I know that only two ISCSI initiator exist for MAC OS X and one is Atto and the other is from studio network solutions and the last is not supported except if you used their SAN product so you're on your own ( or public forum ) if you crash and Atto Xtend is beta at best so forget ISCSI for Mac if you like your data.

I don't want a free product I want a working product with REAL individual support when
you need it like every commercial company in this world give you when you pay for it.
I installed last year a ISCSI SAN from Lefthand Networks with 9TB sync and async setup
in a Mac lab that cost over 50K , Open-E DSS was here during the first testing has an option but finally the product has not fit the bill because of a 4TB replication limit , this year a new project at the same customer site but this time for archiving purpose so I put back the Open-E option on the table and another time the product fail to deliver for both reliability and support.