An interesting project is which shows you how to build your own NAS server using ZFS – well worth a look! Jimmy Dansbo has just published his ‘ Poor man’s storage appliance‘ which also looks very interesting and has an. Or you can spin your own using a variety of base OSs: Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Solaris 11 Express (free for non-commercial), FreeBSD (older version of ZFS), OpenIndiana and the upcoming Illumian project which is a fork from the now discontinued OpenSolaris.

Virtual appliances such as UberVSA, LeftHand, Netapp’s ONTAP Simulator (Netapp customer’s only and capacity limited).

Software appliances such as OpenFiler, FreeNAS, Datacore’s SANSymphony/SAN Melody, Starwind’s iSCSI SAN and Nexenta’s Community Edition.

There’s a great, comprehensive list at which includes both performance and cost comparisons.

Hardware appliances from QNAP, Synology, Iomega etc.

I started off having a quick look around at my storage options for home labs I’ve been using an Iomega IX2-200 for the last year but it’s performance is pretty pitiful so I usually reverted to local storage which rather defeated the purpose. In particular I needed to improve my shared storage and hoped that I could reuse old h/w instead of buying something new.

I spent some time at Christmas upgrading my home lab in preparation for the new VCAP exams which are due out in the first quarter of 2012.

Openfiler vs starwind