Comparison of the various free NAS/VSA appliances?

[StartledPancake]

Hey Patrick,

Dont know if youd have the time but Ive been wondering about the performance and functionality of the various free or "sort of" free storage solutions/VSA's. Ive been considering:

HP's Lefthand VSA on HyperV or VMware - iSCSI only, with a 60 day licence that doesnt expire as long as you dont access advanced features.
Microsofts Storage Server R2 - Just an install of the target on top of 2k8R2. Free to all technet subscribers.
OpenFiler
EMC Celerra VSA

Would be great to have a back to back comparision, particularly on the performance side. Hopefully others would be interested as well.

Cheers

 

[odditory]

isn't the HP and EMC software you mentioned really targeted more for enterprise? a back to back comparison of those would be a huge undertaking.

 

[Patrick]

Great idea! I may have to wait until leaving my current client (NetApp) before undertaking something like this. This type of review is on the longer-term plan but will be hard to do in the short-term as odditory alluded to.

 

[StartledPancake]

Hey Patrick,

No worries, chuck the ONTAP 8 simulator (even the 7, just for a laugh) into the mix then as well if you ever get the time.

@oddity

It depends on what your using your home server for I guess. Mine form a test lab, not a just file store but even that can benefit from homogenising the storage into virtual disk files. Depending on the usage, all storage (even that of your workstations) can be placed on one central set of disks and deduplicated and snapshotted. Less waste and simpler to manage once its all up and running. They all come as preconfigured virtual disks or msi's too, so aren't so daunting if you ever wanted to try one out.

I simply dont have enough kit to try them all out simultainiously, something I doubt Patrick has a problem with.