I just have to jump in here and place my thoughts for those of you like pommes (new to the storage world) who want everything for nothing!
I have been doing SANs for a long time now and I am just going to place my 2 cents here for those of you who have issues with a free product regardless if it is DSS lite!
First if you’re going to evaluate anything test it first. Then think it through and use your left and right brain here people, I can’t understand the difficulty here.
Our facility always keep exact spare parts for soooo many reasons. Now for those of you who are new in this industry this is standard in many military installations and government projects. Also many of the competitors that are proprietary in the SAN market do the same (go and ask and do your research NetApp, EqualLogic LeftHand…you get the idea).

I am thinking that some of you just want free everything, maybe they should give away free hardware as well but then you would complain that they are not good enough, or to slow or that they don’t consistently provide latest.

Go and get the DSS 4TB version, won’t cost much and as To-m has told everyone if you need help on activating again after the 31st they will help you. Or just get the same hardware for replacement parts like we do, it really is not that expensive (if you value your data) and we do this in our facility to service our customers and the equipment we sell starts $15,000+++ and good luck if you change out too different hw – you might just be surprised at the response.

Also I did a google search to find free NAS+iSCSI+FC with a GUI front end and did not come up with anything that is like this with a USB and no need to have another OS like Windstar. I will keep looking though.

Thanks Open-e guys for providing DSS lite!!!