Mukund, Please don't take this personally, but your comments show a remarkable naiveté about the enterprise storage space.
People buy an IBM solution because then they only have one throat to choke when something goes wrong. Nobody lost their job for buying IBM because when the shit hits the fan they can always blame IBM. With an OF solution it is not as clear-cut. Who do I blame when OF dies and takes my company's data with it? Do I blame CentOS? Openfiler? Generic beige-box computer manufacturer? This is why a packaged and supported hardware+software solution is enterprise, but a Linux distro that you can load on generic beige-box hardware and create a mini-SAN out of is not. You could compare Xinit systems solutions to IBM/EMC, or Netapp, but I would not want to make the same comparison with the Openfiler distribution itself. I think the main point he is trying to make is that Openfiler by its very nature is not in the enterprise space. Perhaps if Openfiler is available for a few more years and third-party hardware manufacturers begin to build appliance solutions based on it then you could begin to charge for support and updates. But look at Nessus for an example. Renaud spent many years on his product and made it superior to every closed-source alternative before actually charging money for updates. And you can still get it for free if you're willing to wait 7 days for your updates. I'm just not really seeing the value in an enterprise OF offering, unless you are willing to invest in the support infrastructure to truly make it enterprise. Regards, Luke -----Original Message----- <snip> This "No-one got fired for buying IBM" statement is a relic of the past. I guess you have never come across horror stories of how much money is spent on TCO on an IBM service. I am not knocking them, but I'm saying you never get more than what you pay for. You always get less, and sometimes you get far less. And yes people do get fired for buying IBM, and "nobody got fired for buying Openfiler (yet)". <snip> _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
