Hi Luke On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 09:51 -0400, Luke Youngblood wrote: > Mukund, > > Please don't take this personally, but your comments show a remarkable > naiveté about the enterprise storage space. > > People buy an IBM solution because then they only have one throat to choke > when something goes wrong. Nobody lost their job for buying IBM because when > the shit hits the fan they can always blame IBM. >
This section is deviating from the topic, so I'm just going to ignore it. You may happily consider me a fool :) > With an OF solution it is not as clear-cut. Who do I blame when OF dies and > takes my company's data with it? Do I blame CentOS? Openfiler? Generic > beige-box computer manufacturer? > Openfiler is a free software product. One of the key benefits that free software brings is vendor independence. Xinit Systems or the Openfiler company need not be the only vendor supporting Openfiler, or developing patches for Openfiler. If the Openfiler project or Xinit is to die and end tomorrow, it doesn't mean the end of the product. If there is a market, many will jump in with support services. It has to start somewhere. _We_ are trying to start that market. The same could have been said of Red Hat (Linux) vs. IBM (AIX) when Red Hat started with their distribution. What if Red Hat goes away and takes my company's data with it? But the base software (Linux) itself was open source, which means vendor neutrality. But they setup support services and look at the Linux distribution market now. Tell me where AIX is. Now even IBM is shipping Linux-based solutions. > This is why a packaged and supported hardware+software solution is > enterprise, but a Linux distro that you can load on generic beige-box > hardware and create a mini-SAN out of is not. > Hence you're saying Red Hat Enterprise Linux is -not- an enterprise product according to your definition? > You could compare Xinit systems solutions to IBM/EMC, or Netapp, but I would > not want to make the same comparison with the Openfiler distribution itself. I never did. We are far smaller underdogs compared to IBM, EMC and NetApp. But we are trying to bring the same features they have in their products into the free software realm with a (relatively) easy-to-use management interface. We have to feed our mouths to develop software. You do not see another free software NAS product in the class of Openfiler do you? Do compare us to the free and commercial choices out there. We are trying to do good here and that means we need to have a fund stream to continue doing that. > > I think the main point he is trying to make is that Openfiler by its very > nature is not in the enterprise space. > I consider this a matter of one's perception alone. But you have already said I'm naive so my opinion doesn't count. > Perhaps if Openfiler is available for a few more years and third-party > hardware manufacturers begin to build appliance solutions based on it then > you could begin to charge for support and updates. But look at Nessus for an > example. Renaud spent many years on his product and made it superior to > every closed-source alternative before actually charging money for updates. > And you can still get it for free if you're willing to wait 7 days for your > updates. > Wake up. There are hardware manufacturers on this very mailing list who ship Openfiler. They seek support. Some existing users want support and want to become 'customers'. I have already said this in my last email to which you replied. > I'm just not really seeing the value in an enterprise OF offering, unless you > are willing to invest in the support infrastructure to truly make it > enterprise. > We plan to do that.. establish a support infrastructure. As far as your concerns with non-third party hardware vendors are concerned, Xinit Systems already ships Openfiler and it has been doing that for the past many years from even before Openfiler was open source. Please think a little for yourself about what we're trying to do. A revenue stream will help the project, and help us serve our users better, both in support services and in developing the project further. Mukund _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
