Open source network storage company OpenFiler profiled

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Jennifer Schiff over at EnterpriseStorageForum.com has recently published a profile of open storage company OpenFiler

…Several years later, Openfiler boasts more than 1,000 customers and is busy developing new features to serve its growing customer base — and both enterprises and vendors have taken notice.

In addition to the Linux kernel, Openfiler uses open source technologies such as Samba CIFS fileserver and LVM2 block device virtualization to give small and large enterprises the ability to do file-based network attached storage (NAS) and block-based storage area networking (SAN) “in a single cohesive framework.”

For enterprises seeking a file-based storage networking solution, Openfiler provides CIFS and NFS support to ensure cross-platform capability. And for enterprises with virtualization environments such as Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) XenServer and VMware (NYSE: VMW), Openfiler provides both Fibre Channel and iSCSI (target and initiator) support. Openfiler also supports RAID.

And what about using open source and Linux for storage? Of course we’re used to Lustre, but evidently the enterprise people (the audience for this article) are a little more nervous.

“If you look at some of the guys who are doing storage right now, even the proprietary guys, you will find that the vast majority of them are actually using Linux as the base for their storage offerings,” he said. “And the reason they’re doing that is because there is all this stuff in place, based on the Linux kernel, and these big name vendors — IBM, NEC, Oracle with its BTRFS file system, Sun Microsystems with OpenSolaris — have a vested interest in making sure that their products continue to work in those enterprises. So they’ve completely changed their philosophy.

What about you? Any experience with this software?