One of the biggest trends of the past few years has been the migration of storage features from hardware to software. This has created a whole new category of products and virtual appliances which run on basic commodity hardware and can provide advanced storage capability.
What has been especially interesting are companies like EMC allowing these to be downloaded for free for experimentation by sad geeks storage experts to experiment with in their own lab environments.
I have collected the ones I know about and have created a page linking to them here.
Please have a look and keep me updated/informed as to new ones as they become available.
If you want to know the ones I use on a regular basis; I use FreeNas, OpenFiler and Nexenta to provide some of my NAS/Shared Storage capabilities at home.
But my main home storage capability is provided by a Synology 409, Synology may not be the coolest name but I reckon that they make the best home-NAS solutions.
