[ale] SAN

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 2010-10-22 at 15:05 -0400, Jim Butler wrote:
> I need to put together a storage area network.. (I've never done it 
> before).. Is there a good open-source (and FREE) SAN software
> available? What I want, is to create a storage cluster and then serve
> file-shares via NFS to various servers in our organization. Any
> insight would be appreciated. 

As Jeff already mentioned, it looks like you're actually after NAS.  You
might want to check out FreeNAS, which is a system distribution that is
built on FreeBSD and supports access via CIFS, TFTP, FTP, NFS, and other
protocols.  FreeNAS will turn a computer system with access to storage
into a dedicated network storage system which should be used for no
other purpose.  Because it is built on FreeBSD, you can use ZFS to house
the filesystems.  Also, FreeNAS claims to have support for Apple's Time
Machine, so if you have any systems running Mac OS X on your network
that might be a useful feature.

Check out the Wikipedia article[0] and the Web site[1] for more
information.

	--- Mike

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS
[1] http://freenas.org/