Build your own san or nas for free

home title Posted by Jason Mohan on Jan 26th, 2009 | 1 comment home title

Openfiler is a free open source san built on linux, with a web management interface. If you ever wanted to share storage between systems in the past you would need to buy a EMC type device and spend at least $50,000 – $100,000.  Now you don’t with openfiler (www.openfiler.com), all you need is some hard drives, a decent cpu, and some memory and that’s it. You can build your own san in minutes even with software RAID 5. This is perfect to test VMWare ESX, clustering, shared storage over iSCSI, hot backups, FTP (yes it has ftp capabilities), or share files with AD authenication. Everything is managed through a easy to use web interface, so you don’t need to know linux at all (which in my case I don’t). However I do recommend at least having a gigabit network if you plan on using iSCSI. Below I’ve listed a few features of openfiler and my configuration (to give you an understanding of what you need). To download, or see more features of openfiler go to www.openfiler.com

Features of Openfiler:

iSCSI

FTP

Active Directory Authenication

User Quota for space and much more.

My configuration:

1. Openfiler OS 2.3 (www.openfiler.com)

2. Intel P4

3. 512 MB Ram

4. 70 gb drive for the OS

5.  3-250 gb drives for the storage (in software raid 5 configuration)

home title One Response home title
  1. DoeMoney says:
    January 30, 2009 at 12:28 pm

    Wow Master J, another premium entry – the master of free tech solutions. What about folder shares and permissions?

home title Leave a Reply home title

line
footer