I am planning on setting up a RAID server with around 1TB of storage that caters to all OS/hardware connecting to the server.. Now here is a great find for a free file server OS

FreeNAS

FreeNAS is a small, powerful, full-featured implementation of FreeBSD as a network-attached storage device. (It also happens to be January's Project of the Month at SourceForge.net.) If you're a Linux user like me, the BSD-speak used for devices and such might give you pause, but other than that small caveat, installation and usage shouldn't be a problem. It's powerful enough to be used in the enterprise, but it's friendly enough so that even a typical home office user can take advantage of it. Here's how I created an easy-to-use NAS device for rsync backups and FTP server on my LAN.

ScreenShots
http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/main.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/general_setup.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/authentication_ms-ad.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/console.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/disks_edit.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/disks_graid5.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/disks_management.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/mount_point.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/ftp.png

http://www.freenas.org/images/screenshot/rsynd.png
Download:

http://visites.shango-style.com/phpmyvisites.php?url=http%3A//visites.shango-style.com/phpmyvisites.php%3Furl%3Dhttp%3A//prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freenas/FreeNAS-0.68.iso%3Fdownload%26id%3D7%26pagename%3DFILE%3Ar el_068&id=7&pagename=FILE:Downloads%20/%20ISO%200.68


Read the Whole Article (http://servers.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/01/19/1514204)

OpenFiler

Openfiler is a powerful, intuitive browser-based network storage software distribution. Openfiler delivers file-based Network Attached Storage and block-based Storage Area Networking in a single framework.

Openfiler uses the rPath Linux metadistribution. It is distributed as a stand-alone Linux distribution. The entire software stack interfaces with third-party software that is all open source.

File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV and FTP. Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes) and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5.

Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI (target and initiator), scheduled snapshots, resource quota, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.

Screebshots

http://www.openfiler.com/screenshots/


Download:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/openfiler/x86.dd.iso.gz?modtime=1164377381&big_mirror=0