Keith Dart wrote:
I recommend setting up your server hardware on a decent mini-PC with
server grade disks and installing openfiler. The openfiler uses XFS for
local storage and exports NFS and CIFS (and iSCSI if you want that).
http://www.openfiler.com/
It is based on rpath linux and uses a different package management
system than you may be used to. But it's relatively easy to configure
and maintain.
Both Openfiler and FreeNas look promising from a software perspective.
Conversely, I'm drawing a bit of a blank trying to find suitable
hardware to run that software on. Given that all I need is iSCSI to
SATA and back... for 1 drive at 100Mbps.... everything I can find seems
massive overkill.
I've been toying with the idea of abandoning being able to fire-up a
vmware image to stand in for my server... and shifting to accessing raid
storage over USB. It seems a lot less elegant - but it does eliminate
the need for hardware to run multiple kernels... When I thought 'iscsi'
- I'd hoped that I'd find a cheap external drive that supported it
out-of-the-box for a pittance more than a bare drive. Was I was being
hugely overly optimistic?
