Daniel Knox took FreeNAS and OpenFiler for a ride:
So starting trying out SAN and NAS distro’s today. FreeNAS and OpenFiler.
FreeNAS is based on bsd, and after booting it on my virtual server I found it to be very quick. The install was similarly very fast to do and this was the full version rather than embedded. The web interface also is very nice to work with and I like the features which email reports to the user defined by certain times / events. I think this feature is very useful for everyone especially server rooms where many people cant be bothered to log into the numerous servers to find out the SMART status etc. UPS support is also much more extensive than openfiler as well as the ability to install packages also has its advantages (backula). The only draw back I could see was the lack of NIC bonding, however dropping to a commandline wouldn’t be to bad to solve this. I would say FreeNas definitely excelled at it’s name and provided many NAS features like bittorrent, AFP, DAAP etc. Definitely going to use this on my file server I think.
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and he concludes with:
In conclusion I see FreeNAS being the top for NAS based solutions for now with Openfiler’s strength coming in for the SAN based storage. However with Iscsi support in FreeNAS and ZFS being integrated soon, I could see that it would only require a few of these features that Openfiler has (nic bonding, storage clusters) and FreeNAS would dominate this opensource SAN as well.
Read whole review here (dknox.co.uk)
