David Doughitt has a short but very useful post about NAS. New to NAS, have a read:
“Once you hear what a NAS appliance does, you might be tempted to think (as I did) what all the fuss might be about. But there are reasons for a NAS appliance, though a NAS isn’t for everybody.
Network Attached Storage is nothing more than a server with a pile of disks and a dozen different ways to access them. For most intents and purposes, the difference between a File Server of yesteryear and the Network Attached Storage of today is conceptually rather minimal.
NAS typically provides access to files via such methods as Windows shares, NFS, iSCSI, Appleshare and others.
So what does a NAS appliance provide that a NFS server does not? There are several benefits:”
- Special purpose
- Extensive support
- Ease of use
Read more about these benefits here (administratosphere.wordpress.com)
What about merging effort with Amahi? Amahi looks great, but really lacks the easy RAID management that Freenas has.
What is the difference between OpenMediaVault (A NAS based on Debian) and CoreNAS (Which also calls itself a “NAS based on Debian” (See http://sourceforge.net/projects/corenas/ ).
CoreNAS is an intermediate project to port over FreeNAS to Debian. It will then become OpenMediaVault.