I have been looking to replace my two aging file servers here at home with something a little less power hungry and more cost effective to maintain. Running two sets of Raid5 stripped disks 24×7 was becoming impractical. It also was not addressing my growing concerns about protecting against data loss. I was looking for something versatile that supports protocols like WebDAV, SMB, Rsysc and can operate as ISCSI target. My search ended with Openfiler which looks to be a well packaged file system running Linux. While the IBM Server are more redundant, Triple power supplies, Dual Raid5 arrays they actually do not protect against data loss much more than the Dell does. With the launch of the Dell I will probably extend its filesystem out to use a remote target on a cloud somewhere. This way my data is stored out of sync and remotely. coupled with a near line USB backup I hopefully will feel better covered.
So the store starts when I recently acquired an old Dell 715 and thought it would be fun to convert it to run OpenFiler. It required some upgrades and a remote serial console install. Now I have a cool storage appliance running at home.
Steps here.
Dell 715n PXE install
Posted some updates