custom NAS appliance without the hack

[Tom Metro]

Greg Rundlett wrote:
> Linux Journal recently did an article about OpenFiler
> The article is available only to subscribers...

It'll eventually get published on the public site. I skimmed it in the 
print edition. It was mostly a how-to, which you can probably find 
elsewhere.


> Plus, a lot of hits out there comparing with FreeNAS
> e.g. http://www.scribd.com/doc/29643/OpenFiler-vs-FreeNAS

The author of that comparison concludes that OpenFiler generally 
performs better, and being a more complete distribution (that includes 
debugging tools) is easier to administer. But it's two years old, and I 
think FreeNAS is now available in a more complete form than just the 32 
MB version he used. He also makes no mention of ZFS (which wasn't 
available then), instead using UFS for the file system, which could have 
negatively impacted performance. ZFS is perhaps the most compelling 
reason to use FreeNAS.

I haven't found OpenFiler to be all that interesting, mostly because it 
is RedHat derived, and almost everything I work with these days is 
Debian derived, but also because it seems to offer only a small 
incremental benefit over using a general purpose Linux distribution. No 
new file systems and not slimmed down as much as FreeNAS (which can 
translate to lower costs if you're loading the OS onto a Flash card).

Eventually there will be some other options:

Nexenta Systems sells a commercial NAS OS that I've read is based on a 
OpenSolaris kernel (w/ZFS) and Linux user space (don't know which, if 
any, distribution it resembles). They provide a 30-day trial, but if 
they're GPL compliant, at least some of that code should be available 
unencumbered. (Perhaps the OpenSolaris license permits them to keep the 
kernel proprietary.)

There's a project to combine the FreeBSD kernel with Debian user space:
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7295
http://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD_why

Most of the above is all about getting around the license restrictions 
on Sun's ZFS. (There's a FUSE implementation of ZFS for Linux, but it 
isn't practical for a production NAS, and possibly never will be.) 
There's also the more direct approach, BTRFS, the Linux answer to ZFS, 
as contributed by Oracle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7308

So hopefully we'll eventually see a Debian-derived, compact NAS 
distribution featuring one of the leading-edge fie system technologies.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/