ZFS

Thanks, and yes you're right. I would also add that IMHO ZFS *is* much better than other currently available filesystems in the marketplace today (discounting things like NetApp which cost mucho $$$), as you get several huge advantages like:

1. no need for an expensive and, more to the point, proprietary RAID card, as ZFS uses software instead of hardware (spare CPU cycles are abundant and cheap these days) to control storage access.

2. transactions to guarantee consistent disk state -- you can only have either (1) the state before the file was written/updated OR (2) the state after the file was written/updated, and never an inconsistent state.

3. end-to-end data integrity: what was in ECC RAM is what is guaranteed to be written to, and read back from disk later -- old school RAID solutions don't give you that. This is the #1 selling point of ZFS -- you can easily build setups that won't lose data, and the more redundancy you build in, like double parity and hot spares, the more unlikely it becomes that you will ever experience data loss. And large capacity SATA disks are dirt cheap: 95 euros per TB now.

4. a one line command (zfs scrub pool_name) which will go through all the file systems in your ZFS storage pool and will automatically detect *and correct* any latent failures (caused by bit rot, or dropped bits)

5. admin is extremely simple, and sharing via NFS, SMB/CIFS, and Samba is a one line command on the ZFS server.

6. it can manage virtually infinite amounts of storage -- the only limits you'll encounter will be determined by your wallet.

I could go on but I wont :)

ZFS is the future...

...and SME's can get themselves a box with 4TB of RAID-Z2 storage (RAID 6 on steroids) running on OpenSolaris for around 1000 euros these days. The future of storage has never looked better, even in these credit crunchy days :)

Here's something similar I prepared earlier in the year, for home use, but is suitable for a small business too:

http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/