Hmmm ... perhaps a different route to calm this religious discussion? Instead of trying to change NetApp's business model and force its hardware to go somewhere where it might not want to go at this time, you could instead take a look at Free NAS, a project that's been going for almost a year now. It's at http://www.freenas.org/
According to the project docs, their server supports "CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key."
I spoke with the programmers last summer and they've made a lot of progress.
David Morgenstern eWEEK contributing editor
On Apr 9, 2007, at 10:23 AM, linux4ever@hushmail.com linux4ever@hushmail.com wrote:
to use anything but 100% open source in the enterprise is a moral crime. no company should pay money for closed source evil platforms that do not strive to increase the common good. plus linux outperforms just about anything on the market when you do it right.
why would we want to support microsoft or companies that engage in
the killing of third world people and put profits in front of mankind?
we dont want a linux server just a nice appliance that we can put linux on and use proven technologies like ext3 or reiserfs and serve up our open source content. i strongly doubt WAFFLE is as robust or fast as similar linux raid filesystems.
perhaps if netapp switched to linux they could also help the environment and help companies too but i dont know much about if they care about the people