On 6/29/10, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > If you are looking at openfiler, you might also want to consider > nexentastor. Their community edition is free for up to 12TB of storage. > It's an OpenSolaris/ZFS based system with web management, able to > export cifs/nfs/ftp/sftp/iscsi with support for snapshots, > deduplication, compression, etc. I haven't used it beyond installing in > a VM and going through some options, but it looks more capable than > anything else I've seen for free. Thanks for the info, it looks quite interesting and seems like a simpler option given the claim of easy setup wizard doing things in 15 minutes. The only problem is their HA is commercial only and costs more than the entire hardware budget I've got for this. Crucially, it relies on a failover/heartbeat kind of arrangement. According to some sources, the failover delay of a few seconds will cause certain services/apps to fail/lock up. Not an issue for the immediate need but will be a major no no for the other project I have in the pipeline. Which was why I was thinking of MD raid 1 on the application server site: no failover delay if one of the data server fails to respond to respond in time.