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

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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)

 

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.

 

Syncany file sharing application

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syncany-logoToday I came across Syncany, an interesting and much promising cloud syncing project.

“Syncany is an open-source cloud storage and filesharing application. It allows users to backup and share certain folders of their workstations using any kind of storage, e.g. FTP, Amazon S3 or Google Storage.

While the basic idea is similar to Dropbox and JungleDisk, Syncany is open-source and additionally provides data encryption and more flexibility in terms of storage type and provider”

Syncany

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)