“As an experiment, and finally to get rid of that large, inefficient and ugly tower case, I decided to use the new Trim-Slice as the base for an ultra-low-power, ultra-small replacement file server. The Trim-Slice is built on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform, and the specific model I purchased features a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 32GB SATA SSD.”
Read further: Building an Ultra-Low-Power File Server with the Trim-Slice
Gluster, a provider of scale-out, open source storage for public and private clouds, has announced it has joined the Open Virtualization Alliance
The Open Virtualization Alliance assists businesses with technical advice to better understand and evaluate virtualization options. More and more open source communities are joining together to provide best practices on managing the development of the KVM hypervisor and its associated capabilities.
“Over the last few years, we’ve witnessed rapid growth in the KVM community as organizations look to virtualize their compute infrastructure. Gluster enables them to virtualize their storage layer providing greater flexibility at a lower cost,” said Ben Golub, president and CEO of Gluster. “Joining the Open Virtualization Alliance is a great opportunity to work alongside other leading software vendors to help organizations evaluate and better understand their virtualized storage choices.”
said Ben Golub, president and CEO of Gluster, in a statement.
About Gluster: Gluster Storage Platform is an open source clustered storage solution. The software is a powerful and flexible solution that simplifies the task of managing unstructured file data whether you have a few terabytes of storage or multiple petabytes. Gluster Storage Platform integrates the file system, an operating system layer, and a web-based management interface and installer.
Open-source storage vendor Gluster has introduced a couple of new additions to its scale-out NAS platform. The company claims these are the first scale-out virtual NAS appliances for VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Known as the Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances, they come in two flavors – one for virtual machines (VMs) and one for Amazon-based clouds.
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“Gluster’s new offering is representative of the types of major breakthroughs we’re seeing in storage technology for VM and cloud environments, delivering the scale-out architecture that is needed in a highly responsive manner thanks to its software approach to the problem,” said McClure.
Greg Schulz, an analyst with the Server and StorageIO Group, thinks Gluster has a good solution for companies looking to leverage scale-out NAS for traditional, virtual, private or public cloud environments.
“Their approach of providing flexibility to deploy the technology on different platforms to meet various business or application needs is an example of what scale-out should be about – scale functionality, ease of use, flexible to adapt to different needs while supporting performance, availability, capacity and security with multi-tenancy for virtual, physical and cloud environments,” said Schulz. “This removes some complexity from cloud and virtual environments by reducing the need for a cloud access gateway, appliance or software driver, which should help to reduce costs — including management.”
Read the whole article: Gluster Expands Open-Source Scale-out NAS
The New York Times has put together a guide helping you find the best NAS storage servers for your need:
“… [a] NAS provides a central hard drive on which you can store, share and back up all files from multiple computers in the household. The NAS drive connects via an Ethernet cable to a wireless home-network router, which enables laptops and other devices equipped with Wi-Fi networking to use the drive wirelessly.
Unlike an external hard drive, an NAS device has a processor and uses its own operating system for storing and sharing photos, music, video and personal files.
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Makers of NAS devices say home users primarily use the drives for data backup; centralized storage and file sharing among multiple computers; and remote access to photos, video, music and other files.
Most NAS drives enable families to create one consolidated library of photos, videos and digital music that can be streamed to high-definition TVs and other networked devices in the home. To do so, you will need a digital media adapter or a game console like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 that connects to the TV.
NAS drives also have software that can be set to automatically back up every computer on the network. The software enables you to select files, folders and drives to back up, as well as designate the time and day of the week for automatic backups. You will need to install the software on each computer on the network.
A more sophisticated NAS device contains two hard drives and automatically maintains identical copies of data on each drive to help ensure foolproof data storage. The beauty of this setup, known as mirroring or RAID 1, is that if one hard drive fails, the information will be safe on the other one.”
For the shopping tips: A Guide to Network-Attached Storage Devices for Backup
The Addonics Mini NAS is a small portable Network Attached Storage enclosure solution in the market. Come built in with fast Ethernet 10/100Mbps connection, any 2.5″ SATA hard drive or Solid State Drive (SSD) can be installed into the Mini NAS and become instantly sharable over the LAN. A USB printer can also be shared over the LAN simultaneously when attached to the Mini NAS. With a size equivalent to a VHS tape cassette and weight less than a pound, the Mini NAS can be easily moved around or installed into a very small space.
Similar to the NAS adapter, the Mini NAS supports both SMB (Server Message Block) and the open source Samba network protocols, allowing for cross-platform access of all shared data for most versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and various Linux distributions. For remote users who are not connected over the LAN, the Mini NAS provides FTP access for up to 8 simultaneous users anywhere in the world with an internet connection. In addition, the Mini NAS can also be configured Bit-Torrent downloading appliance or as an iTune media server..
