EON, a ZFS filesystem based storage system

Posted by Gerard on October 25, 2011 in EON · 0 Comment

As far as I can remember, I have not linked and referred to the EON NAS storage system. When you’re in Europe and you hear EON, you may be thinking of the E-ON Energy supplier, but no, utility companies are not the subject of this website.

EON stands for Embedded Operating system/Networking. EON is a ZFS (Zettabyte File System) based operating system, built on Openindiana / Illumos (previously on Solaris) and designed to store any amount of digital data on commodity x86 hardware.

The thing that sets EON apart from other NAS operating systems, is that it offers rock solid, reliable, enterprise featured storage, with unlimited filesystem snapshots (version-ing or rollback points), transparent filesystem compression and de-duplication (duplicate elimination), features that come with ZFS.

EON is a RAM based live/install image which runs from CD/DVD, USB or CF (compact flash) and Disk on Module. The appliance image provides a high performance 32 or 64-bit storage solution built on ZFS, using regular disks which eliminates the use of costly RAID arrays, controllers and volume management software. EON focuses on using a small memory footprint so it can run from RAM while maximizing the remaining free memory for ZFS performance. Using EON, minimizes OS administration and makes the OS virtually disposable.

Some of EON’s features are:

Simple and Secure CLI (command line interface) administration. Future web-based graphical/browser user interface administration
Supports ZFS, iSCSI (target and client initiator), NFS, CIFS / Samba, SFTP, SSH, NTP, IP filtering, Rsync
6 supported RAID levels: (RAID-0 (stripe), RAID-1 (mirror), RAID-10 (striped-mirror), RAID-Z, RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3
Supports client OS, Windows 200x/XP/Vista, 7, Mac OS X(Leopard, Snow Leopard, LION), Unix and Linux
Transparent in-band, dynamic filesystem compression (LZJB or GZIP algorithms)
Capable of expanding the zpool by expanding each disk in the pool (since snv_117)
Thin provisioned (green) file systems
Unlimited files, links, directories and snapshots versions(also known as version-ing or read only clones/copies)
Copy-On-Write (writable) clones
Link aggregation (teaming network interfaces)
User Groups and Quotas
IPfilter module and application to control/restrict network access.
DTrace, Perl and PHP
Deduplication (since EON 0.59.9/snv 129)

Developers are currently working on a new beta and want to know your thoughts and preferences: Thoughts on a beta release of EON ZFS Storage. More features come with the downside of a greater ISO. Less features allow a small footprint and increased speeds.

What do you want to see? Thoughts on a beta release of EON ZFS Storage.