FreeNas or Openfiler

We'll start with FreeNAS. Based on FreeBSD, It's an easy install and leaves you with a GUI web interface with which to configure it, and from what i've been reading it is easier to install and configure that Openfiler. You can install it to a USB drive as well so as to not take up any hard drive space for the install. It does have iSCSI in its core but users istgt to provide that connectivity. Also, LUC is not currently supported so any configuration changes will require istgt to be restarted. FreeNAS does not support shared storage, which allows 2 hosts to connect to the target and only supports 1 NIC which will eliminate any thought of NIC bonding for better performance over an iscsi link. Some things that are supported are 10GigE, remote replication, and ZFS. There is a decent amount of support for the product through the forums, and it uses a smaller footprint than Openfiler.

Now for the Openfiler option, this also needs to be installed on a server and also has a web based GUI for programming. However, I have read that the installation and configuration of this product is slightly more difficult than the FreeNAS. There are also questions of product stability since they started with CentOS and have since moved to rPath Linux, not that this is a dealbreaker or anything, just stating the facts. The benefits of this setup are as follows, iSCSI is supported natively and does not require a service for connectivity, making the iSCSI targets configurable on the fly. The application supports multiple NIC's so binding them is an option for more throughput and better performance, this way link speed should not become a problem because we can always add more NIC's. Hardware and Software RAIDS are supported as well as high availability clustering and block level replication and is scalable to over 60TB. 10GigE is also supported as well as shared storage. Unfortunately, installation to a USB drive is not supported and the forums do not appear to have the support that the FreeNAS community does. This may not bode well for the 3AM support that may be required, although there is paid support if you choose to go that route but being an open source platform I doubt many will.

After reading all this stuff about the 2 options listed above i have decided that the Openfiler option is the better choice for my application. It supports multiple NIC's and iSCSI natively which should help on the performance side of things. The Openfiler also has the replication feature and shared storage option for server clustering which is supported by Xenserver as well and should allow for much greater scalability. Since these servers will be in a production environment that is important to me. However, for a home user just looking to do some file sharing on an old computer that is lying around, the ease of setup and use of the FreeNAS would probably be just fine. I say, Openfiler for the win!!