Encryption in NAS Environments: Requirements and Keys to Success

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The very attributes that make network-attached storage environments invaluable to enterprises-their accessibility, centralization of assets, and flexibility-also make them valuable targets to malicious insiders and external criminals, and susceptible to accidental exposure.

This paper details why encryption is vital in NAS environments that house sensitive assets, and offers some key considerations for picking the right NAS encryption platform.

Encryption in NAS Environments: Requirements and Keys to Success

 

Build your own 180TB NAS for $US1,942.59 (plus disk)

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backblazeBackblaze is back with a third-generation design of its compact data centre storage servers and has also open sourced the design.

You may heck the complete list of parts, which can be found here. The list appears very comprehensive: even $0.02 screws are listed. There’s also a set of design files for the taking.

Each storage pod can hold 45 drives, which in this age of 4TB units means 180TB can be put into operation within its 4U chassis. Once assembled, you can run open source NAS operating systems such as OpenFiler or FreeNAS.

You can read the full blog post here: 180TB of Good Vibrations – Storage Pod 3.0

EonNAS Pro 850X NAS Server Review

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Modern hard drives are remarkably reliable devices, but most have an average uncorrectable read error rate of 10^14. Statistically, that means one read failure for every 12TB of data. The drive doesn’t “crash”; it just gives you corrupted data every now and then.

The key to maintaining a consistently high level of data integrity is found in the ZFS file system employed in the EonNAS Pro series. ZFS features an extensive hierarchical checksum strategy, which eliminates what is often called “silent” data corruption with self-healing storage algorithms. Operating way down at the file system level, ZFS attacks data rot where it starts, at the bit, byte, and block level.

Benchmarkreviews.com have done some thorough testing and written it up in a 15 page review of the EonNAS Pro 850X NAS Server which uses ZFS. Overall they were very happy with the product and rated it 9.3 out of 10, though they were not compare the EonNAS Pro 850X NAS Server with similar NAS server.

The review concludes with:

The EonNAS Pro 850X is targeted to a well-established class of NAS users, the business  community. What they’ve done with their latest round of products is to bring high-end  nformation assurance features down to their base models. Very large data centers know from experience that some piece of data stored in their facility gets corrupted about every 15 minutes. That’s the sort of thing that kept people awake at night, until they found a solution. Sun built the ZFS file system into their Unix-based operating system in 2005, and now it’s one of the stars in the EonNAS product.

The other thing that kept CIOs and IT Directors up at night was the exponential growth of non-structured data, most commonly, email. Once again, ZFS comes to the rescue, with deduplication capability that was incorporated in 2009. ZFS is also very good at managing snapshots, being both quick and space-efficient. Given all of these benefits, you might wonder why every NAS doesn’t use ZFS. One of the reasons may be that porting ZFS to Linux means having to comply with BOTH the GNU General Public License, and the Sun CDDL, which isn’t currently possible. Almost every NAS I’ve tested to date ran a custom Linux distro; the EonNAS models are the only ones to run Solaris 11, a derivative of the original SunOS that pioneered ZFS. So, while the functionality and features of the EonNAS Pro 850X are strictly limited to its intended business role, they are extremely advanced and Infortrend is pioneering the use of high-end data integrity tools in the low end of the marketplace.

Check EonNAS Pro 850X NAS prices

Pros:

+ ZFS File System = No Data Rot
+ Data Deduplication is a first at this price level
+ Performance matches Linux-based systems
+ Comprehensive Business Feature Set
+ Single Pool file system
+ Class-leading WRITE performance
+ 8 GB DDR3-1333 SDRAM is standard
+ Migration from 1 disk to RAID is Fast & Easy
+ TotalRecovery Pro Backup S/W (includes 8 License)
+ Integrated 430W power supply
+ One-Touch backup capability for USB & eSATA drives
+ Robust tools to enhance data availability
+ Excellent value compared to current alternatives
+ Disk Roaming for NAS migration (1,2,3,4=4,3,1,2)

Cons:

- ZFS file system slows performance
- No USB 3.0 ports
- RAID10/50/60 has to be setup manually
- Single power supply, no redundancy
- Drive trays not labeled 1,…8

Infortrend_EonNAS_850X_NAS_Server_EonNAS_Pro_850X_Front_02

About: EonNAS Pro 850X offers tower NAS solution designed to help SMBs and SOHO users optimize file sharing, IP SAN applications and data backup.

It offers enterprise-level features, based on ZFS structure, such as Hierarchical Checksum, Corrupt Data Self-Healing, Data Deduplication, Snapshot, Pool Mirror, Data Compression and Remote Replication deliver high efficiency and excellent reliability.

unRAID vs FlexRAID vs SnapRAID

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There is an interesting thread over on the AVS forums discussing the pros and cons of unRAID, FlexRAID and SnapRAID. They all have their advantages and disadvantages, and the following post bullet points them nicely.

Realtime protection:

  • unRAID and FlexRAID offer real-time parity
  • both only offer a single parity drive solution at this stage (both have plans for dual parity setups in real-time but who gets there first is anyone’s guess)
  • FlexRAID real-time is not as stable as unRAID for realtime parity (it does not handle anything that does not pre-allocate, and it hates Teracopy – author is aware of this issue)
  • Only unRAID offers simulated drive failures — all other solutions won’t offer up your lost files until you do a full repair

Drive pooling

  • FlexRAID and unRAID again both offer this functionality (optional in flexraid, but mandatory for realtime raid)
  • unRAID allows you to both view and operate on the individual drives that comprise the array without impacting realtime parity. Others only allow this functionality in Snapshot mode.

Shares

  • FlexRAID and unRAID handle sharing via their interfaces
  • SnapRAID etc. does sharing via the underlying OS

Performance

  • FlexRAID is the fastest for realtime
  • unRAID can incorporate a cache drive
  • I’m not sure of what the speed is like comparing snapshot parity between FlexRAID and SnapRAID (but am perfectly fine with the performance of SnapRAID)

Support

  • unRAID wins this by a country mile, the community is the most active and very helpful
  • SnapRAID and FlexRAID are also helpful, but suffer from lack of community participation

SnapShot protection

  • FlexRAID has no limit on how many parity drives you can employ
  • SnapRAID is limited to 2, but have plans for 3 drives in the future (probably distant future)

File integrity

  • unRAID does not have this feature
  • SnapRAID does checks on the block level
  • FlexRAID does checks on the file level

Thanks to hdkhang for summarising.

FlexRAID vs NZFS

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There’s been a bit of confusion recently about FlexRAID and NZFS. Brahim, the main developer, is aware and tried to explain the differences:

FlexRAID is a concept and not a product in itself. The core essence of that concept is flexibility and solving many of the shortcomings that plague current storage solutions.

RAID-F, also known as RAID over Filesystem, provides data protection and data pooling over existing file systems  It does that by overlaying its own lightweight and unifying filesystem on top of any file system that the user’s OS can operate over.

NZFS (“Not ZFS”) borrows a number of concepts from ZFS and its RAID suite. NZFS has two modes of operation: RAID under file system and RAID within file system.

In essence, FlexRAID will provide:

  • RAID under filesystem (NZFS)
  • RAID within filesystem (NZFS)
  • RAID over filesystem (RAID-F)

The current FlexRAID implementation of storage pooling has several key advantages over everything else on the market or planned including:

  • Better power saving features (only the disk where the data resides needs to be active)
  • Support for drives with existing data (FlexRAID never format any drive)
  • A drive taken from a FlexRAID pool is fully readable outside of the pool and on any other computer
  • Snapshot RAID when real-time parity synchronization is not necessary
  • Real-time RAID
  • Ability to restore specific files instead of the whole disk
  • Support for network drives in the storage pool
  • Disk spanning for better protection level and utilization
  • Multiple RAID engines including support for RAID∞

NZFS takes a different approach and provides pooling below the filesystem and each NZFS storage pool will need to be formatted with your preferred filesystem be it NTFS, FAT, EXT, etc.

It’s called NZFS because it is not ZFS but will bring many of the ZFS features such as checksum, ZIL, de-dup, copy-on-write, etc. to both Windows and Linux. And, it will be powered by the FlexRAID’s RAID∞ engine.