That's better. I was simply responding the earlier quoted absurdity: "nothing available in the open-source space that compares (in any way) to the proprietary software on these products."

The management interfaces are what make these things saleable for high markups, no question. I'm not a user of "purchased NAS" or even "free NAS specific" systems of any kind here, so I cannot really suggest any good packages simply because I've never researched them myself. I do work on internals, but not the management interfaces -- too high level for me.

I dunno what Drobo and the like are presenting to the user, but their RAID stuff underneath is nearly 100% stock Linux (kernel) capabilities. This includes instant filesystem snapshots, file versioning, rollbacks, RAID (all levels), etc.

Cheers