New Edition of Starwinds Free SAN software launched.

[Moby-Dick]

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-free

I know quite a few Hexites have home storage devices based aroudn a regular OS ( for example freeNas or OpenFiler )

it looks like the latest version of Starwind might be worth a try for those wanting to have a play aroudn with iSCSI.

It seems to have quite a few features that could really let it compete with the big boys out of the homelab and into the SME market...

Key features:

Data Deduplication: Data Deduplication is a specialized mechanism of data-compression that allows reducing needed storage capacity due to the process of eliminating duplicated datare.

Snapshots & Clones: Capture point-in-time snapshots with unlimited rollback points or make full volume copies

CDP (Continuous Data Protection): CDP provides a replication mechanism to ensure an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of zero data loss for applications that require a lower RPO than asynchronous replication can provide

Thin Provisioning: Allocate space dynamically for highly efficient disk utilization.

Support for iSCSI Standards: IPSec, CHAP, MPIO are all fully supported in StarWind Free.

[Splash]

As I was tempted to pickup a second Microserver as a backup device for my VM backup device I may well see what I can do with this - cheers for the heads up Moby

[Moby-Dick]

I'll be interested to see how you get on with it. I can see it being an attractive option for people who would feel more confident with a Windows box .

[Splash]

While I've no problem per-se with linux/bsd/solaris from a storage popint of view I *am* a serial tinkerer. Will see what the bank account looks like after the bills go out on Friday...

[Moby-Dick]

Fingers crossed I'm sure most people on HEXUS wont have a problem poking around with a linux install , but looking towards the business market , not everyone has great linux skills - that's why companies like solarwinds do so well - their stuff isn't rocket science that you could possibly do yourself if you had scripting / linux skills , but for someone that doesn't they can deploy a product and get value from it rought out of the box

[badass]

Fingers crossed I'm sure most people on HEXUS wont have a problem poking around with a linux install , but looking towards the business market , not everyone has great linux skills - that's why companies like solarwinds do so well - their stuff isn't rocket science that you could possibly do yourself if you had scripting / linux skills , but for someone that doesn't they can deploy a product and get value from it rought out of the box

That's what's nice about a windows solution. I installed this and from finishing the download to having it setup as a datastore on vmware was around 5 minutes.
To be fair to Nexentastor, Openfiler and FreeNAS, ignoring the install time, they don't take much longer.
It will be interesting to see how this performs compared to nexentastor as I found that after some further testing, the read and write speeds kept increasing whilst the other solutions did not. Nexentastor would offer up to 50MB/sec throughput on CIFS compard to WS2008R2 offering only 30MB/sec. I'm sure both would offer higher throughput has they been physically installed on the Microserver and had acces to both cores.
If only we could get some ZFS style silent corruption protection for windows boxes.

[badass]

Some performance figures:
Running onn HP Microserver running ESXi 4.1 as a VM with only 1 core assigned to it it will do 70MB /sec maxing out that one virtual core.
I'll be installing WS2008 R2 on the microserver some time and I'll report how much faster it is when running on a non virtualised server with all resources available. I see no reason why it will not saturate a Gigabit ethernet connection.
The write back caching wirk resally well as well.
I'd love to know how much the paid for versions cost but can't be bothered dealing with their sales reps for now TBH.

[Moby-Dick]

I'm not sure what pricing is like either , I'm running it on my mobile lab and happy so far.

closest online I can see is greymater...

http://www.greymatter.com/catalogue/...archiving/5926

[badass]

5.7 is out now. I think the dedupe has gone from experimantal to production ready, though not sure.
I'll be testing it later methinks....