LONDON, UK — Xinit Systems Limited, a UK based Linux server and storage solutions vendor today announced a storage management platform called Openfiler for building NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliances using industry standard x86 architecture with commodity components. Openfiler is a powerful, intuitive browser-based network storage management utility. Openfiler, combined with the underlying Linux-based operating system, delivers a multi-protocol file-based NAS and aims to provide block-based SAN (Storage Area Networking) capabilities in a single framework. Openfiler is ideal for multi-platform networks where the workstations/servers are running heterogeneous OSes, e.g. Microsoft® Windows® 98/XP/2000, Mac OS 9/X®, UNIX® and Linux®. It is designed to consolidate and simplify management of storage resources on a network. In its standalone form, Openfiler installed on a standard x86 Intel-based server or workstation turns that system into a full-fledged NAS appliance. All the storage available in the system, along with any additional storage that the administrator might wish to add at a later date, is available to be exported and shared on an IP network via popular file networking protocols such as: * NFS - Network Filesystem v2 and v3 * SMB/CIFS - Server Message Block/ Common Internet Filesystem * WebDAV - Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning Other file-networking protocols supported or in active development are AFP, for Mac OS 8.x and OS 9.x clients, and NCP for Novell® environments. At the block-level, the roadmap provides for full support for iSCSI both as a target and initiator. In addition to built-in support for Fibre Channel, this means Openfiler will support more block and file-level storage networking protocols than other standalone NAS/SAN appliance software available. Openfiler feature summary The following are just some of the features currently available, or planned for the initial release in Openfiler. Powerful virtualization * Point-in-time copy support (planned) * Multi-disk volume creation (complete) * Online volume expansion (planned) * Volume usage reporting (complete) * iSCSI volume import and export (partially complete) * Volume migration & replication (planned) User account management * Full PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) support (complete) * NIS, LDAP, Hesiod - User Information configuration (complete) * LDAP, Kerberos 5, SMB - Authentication configuration (complete) * Local & global (NIS, LDAP, SMB) user & group management support (complete) Quotas * Local and global group quota management (complete) * Local and global user quota management (complete) * Per-volume based quota management (complete) * Total files and total block quota management (complete) Extensive share management features * Per-volume based share creation (complete) * Multi-level share directory tree (complete) * Full ACL support on per-share basis (complete) * Host-based ACL support on per-share basis (complete) * Per-share services activation (NFS, CIFS, AFP, HTTP, FTP, Netware) (complete) Full Industry-standard protocol suite * TCP/IP network stack * CIFS/SMB Support for Microsoft Windows-based clients (complete) * NFSv3 support for all UNIX clients (complete) * WebDAV and HTTP 1.1 support (complete) * iSCSI initiator (partially complete) * iSCSI target (partially complete) * NFSv4 support (Extended Modules Kit) (planned) * Apple File Protocol (AFP) for legacy Macintosh file sharing with ACL (planned) * FTP support (complete) * Netware client support (planned) Clustering & high availability * GFS clustered filesystem support (planned) * Appliance failover support (planned) * FC HBA multipathing (planned)