Apple shuts down ZFS open source project

Posted on by

Apple‘s efforts to support the development of ZFS, an advanced file system originally created by Sun, were officially terminated today in a notice posted by MacOS Forge.

The tersely worded message only stated that “The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.”

…

Apple’s interest in porting ZFS was first signaled in early 2006 when it contacted Sun’s OpenSolaris project; By August 2007 an early, read-only port of ZFS was published on Mac OS Forge and command line support was added to Mac OS X Leopard.

Comments by Sun executives had tipped of wild speculation that ZFS would become the default file system of Mac OS X, and pundits pounced upon the idea that Apple’s own technology was terrible and that anything it could replace with from outside sources would solve lots of problems for end users. The reality was that Mac OS X and third party software has lots of dependancies upon HFS+, and that ZFS really offered the greatest potential for server users. Most home Mac users don’t even have multiple hard drives to pool with ZFS.

…

Behind Apple’s backtracking on ZFS is Oracle’s announcement in April 2009 to buy Sun. While this should have no impact on other Sun technologies Apple has borrowed from OpenSolaris, such as DTrace, or other open source packages maintained by Sun under the GPL, such as MySQL, Sun’s ownership and stewardship of ZFS is at risk because Oracle already has its own advanced, open source file system: BTRFS.

In addition to Oracle’s unlikely desire to fund the ongoing development of two overlapping new file systems, Sun’s ZFS had already come under fire for patent infringement from NetApp as part of a patent war instigated by Sun.

Read the whole article: Apple shuts down ZFS open source project (AppleInsider)

Why NAS Might Overtake SAN Storage

Posted on by

“Truer words could not have been written, and they still ring true today. I am fond of saying that there are no new engineering problems, just new engineers solving old problems. Today SAN and NAS still dominate the market. Many of the tradeoffs are the same, but change is coming.

“While not much has changed in the nearly eight years since that article was written, there are some big changes on the way, particularly for NAS:

* The introduction of NFSv4.1 (pNFS) has the potential to put NAS performance on a par with SAN. NAS vendors are going to have to change their file systems to provide better scalability, however. Up to now, between the performance limitations of NFS and Gigabit Ethernet speeds, it was not important for vendors to have scalable file systems.

* 10GbE is faster than the current SAN fabric performance of 8Gbps Fibre Channel and it is far less expensive (see Falling 10GbE Prices Spell Doom for Fibre Channel).

“With SAN shared file systems, sharing data from multiple machines in a SAN is now possible. It was not possible to easily share data across SANs in 2002, because shared file systems were in their infancy.”

Full article: Why NAS Might Overtake SAN Storage

Media server offers up to 14TB NAS storage

Posted on by

Envive, Inc. announced a Linux-based, HD-ready media server that offers up to 14TB of network-attached storage (NAS) capacity. The TheaterStation Multi-Zone Digital Media Management System with Centralized Networked Storage is available with TheaterStation “TSClient Mini” satellite devices, as well as several NAS storage options, the Carrollton, Texas-based company says.

The newly announced Centralized Networked Storage options are designed to expand the Envive’s base TheaterStation Digital Media Management System, which was introduced in September along with TSClient satellite devices.

An Envive spokesperson confirmed that the TheaterStation devices run Linux. (This was not a wild guess on our part, since most new media center systems appear to run on penguin power). He also noted that, “We are interested in helping create a Linux-based platform in the home that would be open to developers building applications. Our vision is far beyond just a Linux-based Media Center.” The spokesperson did not mention, however, when an SDK might be available.

…

The optional RAID-enabled central networked storage units (pictured below) can hold up to 14TB of storage, says Envive. Storage is said to be available in a four-bay “TS4T” tower unit for up to 4TB storage, or else in rack-mount units for larger installations. The latter include a 1U four-bay “TS4R” unit for 4TB to 6TB of storage, and a 2U, eight-bay “TS8R” unit for 4TB to 14TB, says Envive.

Source and more info, incl pictures, here

New FreeBSD Foundation Project: HAST

Posted on by

FreeBSD foundation logoThe FreeBSD Foundation has announced that is funding a new funded project: HAST

“Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement storage replication software that will enable users to use the FreeBSD operating system for highly available configurations where data has to be shared across the cluster nodes. The project is partly being funded by OMCnet Internet Service and TransIP BV.

The software will allow for synchronous block-level replication of any storage media (GEOM providers, using FreeBSD nomenclature) over the TCP/IP network and for fast failure recovery. HAST will provide storage
using GEOM infrastructure, which means it will be file system and application independent and could be combined with any existing GEOM class. In case of a master node failure, the cluster will be able to
switch to the slave node, check and mount UFS file system or import ZFS pool and continue to work without missing a single bit of data.

High-availability is the number one requirement for any serious use of any operating system,

Pawel Jakub Dawideksaid Pawel Jakub Dawidek, FreeBSD Developer.

Highly available storage is one of the key components in such environments. I strongly believe there are many FreeBSD users that have been waiting a long time for this functionality. I’ll do my best to deliver software that matches FreeBSD quality and that will satisfy the needs of our users.

Pawel has been an active FreeBSD committer since 2003. During this period, he has touched almost every part of the kernel. But, his main interest in FreeBSD is storage and security related topics. Pawel is the author of various GEOM classes (eli, mirror, gate, label, journal, hsec, etc.), geom(8) utility, various opencrypto improvements as well as port of the ZFS file system from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD.

The project will complete by February 2010.”

If you want, you can support this project too.

QNAP TS-110 Turbo NAS Server

Posted on by

After the four-bay TS-410 and dual-bay TS-210, QNAP introduces the single bay TS-110 Turbo NAS server for home and SOHO users. The device has one 3.5-inch SATA hard drive bay support up to 2TB of storage capacity.

 

QNAP expanded its Turbo NAS lineup with the addition of the TS-110 desktop NAS server for home and SOHO users. The TS-110 supports a single 3.5″ SATA hard drives with up to 2TB of total capacity and features a Marvell 800MHz CPU and 256MB DDRII memory which provides solid performance with low power consumption. The TS-110 can be configured with QNAP’s exclusive Q-RAID 1 for high data redundancy. The TS-110 also supports advanced features such as iSCSI Target service with Thin Provisioning and a Gigabit LAN port and policy based IP blocking, S.M.A.R.T hard disk health monitoring, email and SMS notifications if there are problems with the unit, features generally found on much higher end NAS servers. The TS-110 also features 3 USB ports (with unique auto-copy feature on the front port) for expanding the storage capacity, printer sharing, or backing up the TS-110. The TS-110 also features an e-SATA port.

The TS-110 is a smart choice for installation in home or home-based business as it’s fully compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and UNIX networks and features a built-in UPnP/ DLNA media server (with TwonkyMedia enabled) supporting a wide range of DLNA media players such as Sony® PS3 and Microsoft® Xbox 360 gaming consoles. By installing the DLNA/ UPnP application on your iPhone or iPod touch, users can access the TS-110 on the home network and play videos, music, and photos from the server over the network. In addition, the high-speed PC-less Download Station with the unique QGet utility enables users to manage the BT/ FTP/ HTTP download tasks (fully BitTorrent compatible) remotely over the local network or the Internet. The TS-110 can perform centralized backups of all computers attached to the network to protect valuable paid downloaded music & video content, digital pictures, and documents.

“QNAP’s new TS-110 is an ideal choice for home and SOHO users due to its outstanding performance-to-price ratio” said Sam Lo, Product Manager of QNAP Systems, Inc. “When you consider the TS-110 can be a file server, home media server, host websites, and backup all the computers on the network, it’s a fantastic value” Mr. Lo added.

The TS-110 comes with QNAP’s new V3 of its NAS management software, embedded as firmware, adding significant new features including virtual disk drives support (up to 8 virtual disks via iSCSI expansion over the network). Network Discovery Services are enhanced with new Bonjour support offering zero-configuration networking for HTTP, SAMBA, FTP, AFP, and SSH based networks, and full UPnP support. Other new features of the V3 firmware include EXT4 support for very large volumes and file sizes and SNMP support. V3 includes an all-new AJAX-based web interface that is extremely easy to use and is broadly compatible with popular web browsers.

TCheck out the details of the TS-110 and PCWorld’s verdict