I have built my own iSCSI devices since the earliest open source code was available (2000 or there abouts) so I don't mind getting my hands dirty. I am a small company of two people and I support small companies of usually under 50 persons. Even though I am comfortable with the command line and editing config files not everyone is.

This brings me to Open-E. I have looked at the product for some time. Even at $600 it can often be more than a small company can afford. If one adds up all the "essential" software everything adds up. It also isn't just the cost of the software. It takes time to install, test, learn, etc. It takes hardware resources and ongoing support considerations.

I have tried to introduce as much disaster avoidance technology as I can. Small companies don't have the support infrastructure or the depth of infrastructure that their bigger cousins do, so things need to be simple but robust.

Well DSS light seems to fill several needs here. It is certainly affordable from the customer perspective and it does add the potential for disaster avoidance. I would like to see the DSS Lite offering continue but I would like to pay for it. I could see a smaller capacity, (1 TB), software only, no support other than the forum with pay per incident option. Who much?? There are several free products. Openfiler and FreeNAS. SANmelody has a $200 lite version so $100 would fall comfortably in the middle.

Comments?