For some, this is old news, but when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems the free operating system that Sun produced (OpenSolaris) was dropped.  Many people use this operating system as a free, effective replacement for an enterprise-class NAS/SAN appliance as it provided many of the amenities that most other NAS/SAN appliances offer such as: LUNs that can be mounted over iSCSI or Fibre Channel, NFS, CIFS, Snapshotting, Block-Level Data Deduplication, and many more.  I was saddened to hear that Oracle has dropped support and production for the operating system and I can only assume many others were as well, but there is hope.

On September 14th, the Illumos Foundation, created by Sun Microsystems before they were bought, announced that they would be continuing a fork of OpenSolaris called OpenIndiana, built on the Illumos Kernel, and it is aimed to be compatible with Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express and will be completely open-source and free.  Below are links to the OpenIndiana production announcement where a slideshow can be viewed about their goals in production and also below there is a link to their home page.

Announcement: http://openindiana.org/announcement/

Home Page: http://openindiana.org/