Todd Dixon writes about his introduction into the open source world and his decision to replace the OpenSuse “monster” with the light FreeNAS:
“This HP file server was loaded with a dozen 36 GB SCSI drives, which FreeNAS set up in a software RAID and we were off and running.
After some simple user and group setup, we backed up our FTP server. We also house a nightly file backup from our Denver cluster in Birmingham. It was backed up to our FreeNAS server too, a double backup.
FreeNAS works fine with an old Pentium III (933 MHz), showing only 1 percent CPU usage and 20 percent of the 1 GB total of RAM. I’m not exaggerating, the thing screams. We are about to put it online full time as our complete replacement for our FTP server, but it has ended up giving us much more. Amanda Alexander at our company’s Denver cluster has had some issues with one of their file servers. She has packaged it up and sent it to us and we are planning on putting FreeNAS on it.
Each of us probably has a storage room filled with machines that have lost a step in speed or need a $50 hard drive. The echoing sentiment among these pages and elsewhere is to extend life, troubleshoot, fix and reuse. We need to always be searching for how we might repurpose a computer or server so that we can get the maximum benefit from it.
FreeNAS has helped us to accomplish this. It is elegant in function and a perfect option for us to continue to give even more data services to everybody here in Birmingham even while our budgets have been tightened.”
Read the “FreeNAS: A Simple Data Storage Solution” post (radioworld.com 11/08/2009)
