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