Category Archives: Data Storage

A first look at NZFS and replacing unRAID with NZFS’s Transparent RAID (tRAID)

Posted on by

Brahim has added a blog post explaining  NZFS (Next-Generation Zion File System) and going into the the typical data storage problem: Optimal Capacity vs Optimal Performance vs Optimal Protection

NZFS can deal with the above limitations and “NZFS is implemented as a two part series:

  • A completely independent RAID system that works with any file system (use your favorite file system on top of it)
  • An optional File System designed to take greater advantage of the RAID system and provide advanced features such dedup, copy-on-write, checksuming, self-healing, etc. The file system component is optional because there are existing file systems such ReFS that provide some of the features the NZFS file system provides or the user might just not need those extra features. NZFS does not try to put you into a box unlike ZFS with its RAIDz system.”

The RAID system in NZFS has been designed in such a way that it can implement all standard RAIDs and many non-standard RAIDs, and on top of this, it supports Transparent RAID (tRAID). Transparent RAID is a better version of unRAID that runs on any modern version of Windows and Linux.

Brahim has also included a clear diagram showing how NZFS supercedes unRAID.

nzfs_traid_features

 

Read the whole post here: A first look at NZFS and replacing unRAID with NZFS’s Transparent RAID (tRAID)

 

Data storage best practices: Top five storage management answers

Posted on by

The top five Ask the Expert answers of 2010 to help you learn about the most important data storage best practices for your organization. Read about storage management tools and technologies such as multiprotocol or unified storage, data migration, centralized data storage and cloud storage

  • How can multiprotocol storage arrays benefit SMBs?
  • What are some good data migration strategies for SMBs?
  • How does unified data storage apply to SMBs?
  • What type of centralized data storage should I use for 1.5 TB of data across multiple locations?
  • Is it possible to use a cloud storage service for primary storage?

Read the answers: Data storage best practices: Top five storage management answers

Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

Posted on by

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Fedora 12) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

SUN OpenStorage presentation

Posted on by

“At work (client site) SUN made a presentation about their OpenStorage products (Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems) today.

From a technology point of view, the software side is nothing new to me. Using SSDs for zfs as a read-/write-cache is something we can do (partly) already since at least Solaris 10u6 (that is the lowest Solaris 10 version we have installed here, so I can not check quickly if the ZIL can be on a separate disk in previous versions of Solaris, but I think we have to wait until we updated to Solaris 10u8 until we can have the L2ARC on a separate disk) or in FreeBSD. All other nice ZFS features available in the OpenStorage web interface are also not surprising.

But the demonstration with the Storage Simulator impressed me. The interaction with Windows via CIFS makes the older version of files in snapshots available in Windows (I assume this is the Volume Shadow Copy feature of Windows), and the statistics available via DTrace in the web interface are also impressive. All this technology seems to be well integrated into an easy to use package for heterogeneous environments. If you would like to setup something like this by hand, you would need to have a lot of knowledge about a lot of stuff (and in theFreeBSD case, you would probably need to augment the kernel with additional DTrace probes to be able to get a similar granularity of the statistics), nothing a small company is willing to pay.”

Read Alexander’s full post:  Sun OpenStorage Presentation

A guide to network attached Storage Devices for Backup

Posted on by

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.

…

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