On 11/08/10 4:29 PM, James A. Peltier wrote: > You then need a method for dealing with the high availability aspect. You need to be able to fence the storage while a fail-over is taking place. You need to (maybe) move MAC addresses and other storage IP bits. This is the hard part! Getting this right is not necessarily a trivial task. > > Products like FreeNAS and OpenFiler only target the easy stuff. the -really- hard part is maintaining write cache coherency across redundant storage servers. thats what seperates the pros from the toys. btw, the product that the OP was asking about, the Quantum StorNext, I did a bit of reading on that, its a distributed network storage system. Quantum is selling it as a "Data Sharing and Archive" software, its not a conventional SAN at all. It looks like its being sold to the TV post production industry, using Apple XSan and XServer based storage. Quantum acquired it when they picked up ADIC, who in turn had bought the original company that had developed it.