Category Archives: Storage Technology

iSCSI to the Rescue

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Most RAID-class NASes have supported iSCSI for some time and iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) has been around for awhile and was developed as a SAN (Storage Area Network) protocol.

You can think of iSCSI as a way to provide computers with the illusion of large volumes of direct-attached storage, while the storage actually sits in a NAS or usually larger storage farm somewhere on the network. The QNAP diagram below illustrates the concept.

iscsi_diagram

smallnetbuilder has a nice explanation of how iSCSI performance compares to SMB performance. You will be surprised about the results: NAS Too Slow? Try iSCSI – Setup-more, Features, Performance.

 

Experimental RAID 5 and 6 support in Btrfs

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Chris Mason has released experimental Btrfs extensions which enable the file system to natively support RAID 5 and 6 in addition to the existing RAID 0 and 1 support. Mason is lead developer of the file system, which has long been included in the Linux kernel but is still marked as experimental.

In an announcement regarding the new feature, he includes benchmark results obtained using two fast systems containing flash storage. In some of these tests, native Btrfs RAID runs two to three times faster than a multiple device (MD) created using mdadm. Mason addressed the MD array directly in some tests and set up a Btrfs partition on it in others. (via)

Announcing FlexRAID NZFS (Not ZFS)

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Brahim, the lead developer of FlexRAID, has annouced NZFS, Not ZFS. The current FlexRAID implementation of storage pooling has several key advantages over other storage spooling solutions, but things are getting even better with NZFS.

NZFS will be powered by  FlexRAID’s RAID∞ engine and provides pooling below the filesystem, i.e. a NZFS storage pool will need to be formatted with your favorite filesystem be it NTFS, FAT, EXT.
Although there’s no commonality with ZFS, NZFS borrows a number of concepts from ZFS and its RAID suite as it will bring many of the ZFS features such as checksum, ZIL, de-dup, copy-on-write, etc. to both Windows and Linux.
We’re looking forward to testing this in the future.

Btrfs brings “Pretty Beefy” changes in Linux 3.2

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Linux kernel 3.2 will be out early next year, and included will be some exciting changes for the btrfs file system:

“Among the noteworthy changes to Btrfs in Linux 3.2 compared to Linux 3.1 are many clean-ups and optimizations, scrubber improvements (including performance improvements), error handling fixes, and improved recovery support. There were also some log tree improvements to Btrfs, but they were backed out at the last minute and now a likely candidate for the Linux 3.3 kernel. ”

Phoronix has more details: Btrfs brings “Pretty Beefy” Changes in Linux 3.2