The Register: How LinuxDisk will put a bomb under storage fatcats

“What LinuxDisk provides is a bridge between cheap disks and the
rest of the network, and in particular logical volume manager
support. For the first time vanilla Linux systems will become
storage controllers: at the heart of LinuxDisk is a driver that
looks to the world like SCSI in target mode. So while the rest of
world sees a SCSI or Fibre Channel array, the boxen are simply
running cheap IDE disks. The LVM provides virtualised file
system.”

“Why is this revolutionary? Well as we’ve pointed out
many times before, the proprietary storage behemoths
exemplified by EMC are really selling boxes of disks: and disks
are very very cheap. Sure, people are also buying a service, but
the technology deficit here is negligible, while the price markup
is enormous. And that’s a natural challenge for a
Penguin.”

“The first LinuxDisk code was posted on SourceForge in October,
and the code should be shippable towards the end of this year.
Assuming the good people of the T.13 committee can quarantine the
CPRM sickness to removable media, that is…”

Complete
Story