NAS Storage Server

As far as I can remember, I have not linked and referred to the EON NAS storage system. When you’re in Europe and you hear EON, you may be thinking of the E-ON Energy supplier, but no, utility companies are not the subject of this website.

EON stands for Embedded Operating system/Networking. EON is a ZFS (Zettabyte File System) based operating system, built on Openindiana  / Illumos (previously on Solaris) and designed to store any amount of digital data on commodity x86 hardware.

The thing that sets EON apart from other NAS operating systems, is that it offers rock solid, reliable, enterprise featured storage, with unlimited filesystem snapshots (version-ing or rollback points), transparent filesystem compression and de-duplication (duplicate elimination), features that come with ZFS.

EON is a RAM based live/install image which runs from CD/DVD, USB or CF (compact flash) and Disk on Module. The appliance image provides a high performance 32 or 64-bit storage solution built on ZFS, using regular disks which eliminates the use of costly RAID arrays, controllers and volume management software. EON focuses on using a small memory footprint so it can run from RAM while maximizing the remaining free memory for ZFS performance. Using EON, minimizes OS administration and makes the OS virtually disposable.

Some of EON’s features are:

• Simple and Secure CLI (command line interface) administration. Future web-based graphical/browser user interface administration
• Supports ZFS, iSCSI (target and client initiator), NFS, CIFS / Samba, SFTP, SSH, NTP, IP filtering, Rsync
• 6 supported RAID levels: (RAID-0 (stripe), RAID-1 (mirror), RAID-10 (striped-mirror), RAID-Z, RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3
• Supports client OS, Windows 200x/XP/Vista, 7, Mac OS X(Leopard, Snow Leopard, LION), Unix and Linux
• Transparent in-band, dynamic filesystem compression (LZJB or GZIP algorithms)
• Capable of expanding the zpool by expanding each disk in the pool (since snv_117)
• Thin provisioned (green) file systems
• Unlimited files, links, directories and snapshots versions(also known as version-ing or read only clones/copies)
• Copy-On-Write (writable) clones
• Link aggregation (teaming network interfaces)
• User Groups and Quotas
• IPfilter module and application to control/restrict network access.
• DTrace, Perl and PHP
• Deduplication (since EON 0.59.9/snv 129)

Screenshot taken from eonstorage website.

Synology has announced the availability of DiskStation DS712+, a high performance and scalable 2-bay NAS server designed for small and medium businesses.

“Synology DS712+ presents tremendous opportunity for SMB owners wishing to have the flexibility of scaling up to a larger storage solution from a smaller form factor. As small businesses grow, so does their data. With Synology DX510 expansion unit, the DS712+ offers a unique solution by scaling up a compact 2-bay NAS server into a 7-bay storage on-the-fly, providing up to 21TB of storage capacity,”

said Chad Chiang, product manager of Synology Inc.

Powered by a 1.8GHz dual core processor with Link Aggregation enabled, the read speed of the DS712+ outperforms its predecessor by 60% faster at 180.91 MB/sec and average write speed at 105.59 MB/sec under RAID 1 configuration. To ensure high availability to stored data, the DS712+ features front mount hot swappable drives with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports for failover protection to prevent unexpected service downtime.
By introducing fresh external enhancement of two additional side ventilations and a larger 92mm fan, the DS712+ has vastly elevated its overall airflow and minimized the noise level to 19.2dB(A). Power consumption is further reduced to 27.5 watts under full operation and 17.6 watts when hard drives enter hibernation mode.

The DS712+ features comprehensive iSCSI support with a seamless storage solution for major virtualization servers, including VMware® vSphere™, Citrix® XenServer™ and Microsoft® Hyper-V™. Furthermore, the DS712+ offers flawless integration into ADS and LDAP environments with Windows® ACL support for easy account and privilege management.

The DS712+ is running on DiskStation Manager 3.2 (DSM 3.2), the operating system of every Synology NAS Server. DSM makes complicated things simple and hard things possible by providing versatile features on a snappy, intuitive, and multitasking web-based user interface. Acknowledged for its continuous worldwide recognition, Synology received WINMAG Pro’s “2011 SMB Proof Award” for the same series DS411+II.

“Synology DS712+ presents tremendous opportunity for SMB owners wishing to have the flexibility of scaling up to a larger storage solution from a smaller form factor,”

said Chad Chiang, product manager of Synology Inc.

“As small businesses grow, so does their data. With Synology DX510 expansion unit, the DS712+ offers a unique solution by scaling up a compact 2-bay NAS server into a 7-bay storage on-the-fly, providing up to 21TB of storage capacity,”

concluded the company’s rep.

Buy

Mr SecaGuy has put together a very useful step-by-step tutorial showing how you can set up a iSCSI target in OpenFiler: Create iSCSI target in OpenFiler.

“If you have a SAN storage, or a dedicated server to serve as file and storage service to other server, I am suggesting you to use Openfiler. This operating system is specifically built to manage and deliver file-based Network Attached Storage and block-based Storage Area Networking in a single framework.

I will not showing you on how to install Openfiler in this tutorial. I will show you on how to setup iSCSI target to be mounted in another server.”

By following these 9 steps you’ll have a iSCSI target up an running in a matter of minutes:

• Review the block drive layout
• Ensure iSCSI services are turned on
• Specify which host can connect to the storage server
• Create a physical volume
• Create a volume group
• Add volume
• Perform iSCSI mapping
• Allo whost to access target
• iSCSI target ready.

About OpenFiler: Openfiler is an operating system that provides file-based network-attached storage and block-based storage area network. It was created by Xinit Systems, and is based on the rPath Linux distribution. It is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. Its software stack interfaces with open source third-party software.

This video, created by the FreeNAS Team, shows how to configure FreeNAS for backups on Windows, Mac OSX, and PC-BSD.

YouTube Direkt

FreeNAS 8.0.2 has been released, fixing some problems with the email subsystem: Announcing FreeNAS 8.0.2-RELEASE

After two years of hard work, or should we say, after two years of teasing the community with videos, project founder Volker Theile has now made the first development release available to the community: OpenMediaVault 0.2 (lx).

Volker used to be one of the main contributors to FreeNAS, but decided that instead of FreeBSD, Debian would be a better base for the NAS operating system that he had in mind, and OpenMediaVault was born. The development of FreeNAS was then taken over by iXsystems.

The new NAS operating system is mainly aimed at home users and small businesses, but its use is not limited to these. When the code and the development have matured OMV can be used in enterprises as well.

OMV 0.2 is based on Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” and features a modular plug-in system for additional, community developed extensions. Three optional plug-ins are currently available for the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), BitTorrent and an iTunes/DAAP server; iSCSI-Target, UPS and LVM plugins later.

More information about the release can be found on the OpenMediaVault Features page, on the OMV wiki and in the release announcement.

You can download the ISO image from SF.

Great job, Volker!

OpenMediaVault is a free network-attached storage server, supporting: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, and software RAID (0,1,5), with a web-based configuration interface. OpenMediaVault is currently distributed as an ISO image and in source form. OpenMediaVault needs to be installed on a Compact Flash, USB, or dedicated hard drive. (wikipedia)