Open source storage software can be obtained in one of two ways - freely downloaded from a web site or purchased. For example, users interested in trying the open source Amanda backup software may either download a community edition from the sourceforge.net web site or purchase an enterprise edition from Zmanda's web site. While the underlying source code should be the same in both instances, Zmanda provides a 'sanity check' of the enterprise edition code ensuring that the version that the user downloads and installs is fully tested and compiled at their labs.

DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) is an open source storage software product available in both free and commercial versions. DBAN meets the 5022.22-M standards of the Department of Defense (DoD) for data erasure by overwriting all disk locations three times. Network Resource Group's Hull primarily supports Linux in his clients' environments and says he uses DBAN on a "constant basis to clean hard drives or partitions for my clients."

Other users like David Ritchie, an IT manager with an Atlanta-based staffing firm, still finds DBAN is not quite ready for his environment. With DBAN, which is often used on smaller servers with internal disk drives, Ritchie encountered some quirks when trying to erase data on volumes on external storage. "The amount of storage it displays is different than what is presented by the external storage array and the program runs single-threaded so you need to be strategic in how you deploy it," he says.

The AoE (ATA over Ethernet) protocol provides a method that is comparable to Fibre Channel for users to connect to external storage using common the 1Gbit/sec Ethernet protocol and network switches. As a registered IEEE protocol, AoE runs at lower level in the Ethernet stack than TCP/IP so it does not impact server performance in the same way that the iSCSI protocol does yet it provides approximately the same level of performance as more expensive Fibre Channel SANs. Coraid's CEO, Jim Kemp says, "On a 1Gb Ethernet link, AoE can achieve 110MB of throughput without burdening the host processor."

However, AoE does have a number of downsides. First, while drivers are freely available for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris, Windows users still need to purchase an AoE driver such as Rocket Division Software's Starport software. Second, AoE is not a routable protocol so it can not be used to access storage on other segments of the LAN. Third, storage products that support this protocol are only available from a few vendors such as Coraid. Finally, AoE requires newer network switches that provide flow control that maximize throughput and limit network collisions.