What is the "special sauce" that enables vendors to charge huge premiums for an enterprise-class storage array? These days we have many of the pieces -- LVM, raid, scalable filesystems, SAN and NAS target capability -- and we even have the beginnings of a remote API solution with libstoragemgmt and targetd. It seems like more than one vendor's value-add consists solely of an attractive and colorful web UI! Not that some aren't innovating, but isn't it about time F/OSS commoditizes what they were shipping ten years ago? Is this something the F/OSS community should aim for, or is the attraction for customers really the support, and the warm feeling of a product from a known, commercial entity?
