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Configuring storage in FreeNAS

Lee Schlesinger

October 24, 2008 7:00:00 PM

The essence of the FreeNAS server is to provide storage that is easily accessible from the network. To this end, it is important to understand how FreeNAS handles hard disks and how they can be configured and used to provide the best and most reliable storage for your network.

Turn your machine into enterprise storage with Openfiler

Lee Schlesinger

September 10, 2008 9:00:00 AM

In my job as a systems engineer, I have handled various storage implementations for our enterprise clients. These may be in the form of direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), or Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) systems. In these implementations, clients generally use proprietary storage products from vendors such as EMC, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and EqualLogic. Many of these devices work just like ordinary servers with multiple hard disks and an operating system. Some use Unix and Linux as base operating systems, so I began to explore the possibility of using that kind of operating system on ordinary servers to turn them into storage boxes. I found Openfiler, which supports most storage protocols and can save you $5,000 or more by providing enterprise-level storage absolutely free for any box that meets the minimum requirements.

SSD vs. SATA benchmarks, round 2: Server applications

Lee Schlesinger

July 31, 2008 4:00:00 PM

Yesterday I presented Bonnie++ and IOzone benchmarks for a solid state drive in a client machine and discussed the relative merits of purchasing an SSD over a set of hard disks costing the same money. Today I'll look at deploying and taking advantage of the extremely fast seek time of the SSD on a server.

SSD vs. SATA RAID: A performance benchmark

Lee Schlesinger

July 30, 2008 4:00:00 PM

Solid state drives (SSD) have many advantages over traditional spinning-platter hard drives including no noise, low power and heat generation, good resistance to shock, and most importantly, extremely low seek times. To see just how much an SSD might improve performance, I used Bonnie++ to benchmark a contemporary SSD as it might be used in a laptop computer.

Get to know Ubuntu's Logical Volume Manager

Lee Schlesinger

July 30, 2008 9:00:00 AM

Hard drives are slow and fail often, and though abolished for working memory ages ago, fixed-size partitions are still the predominant mode of storage space allocation. As if worrying about speed and data loss weren't enough, you also have to worry about whether your partition size calculations were just right when you were installing a server or whether you'll wind up in the unenviable position of having a partition run out of space, even though another partition is maybe mostly unused. And if you might have to move a partition across physical volume boundaries on a running system, well, woe is you.

Benchmarking hardware RAID vs. Linux kernel software RAID

Lee Schlesinger

July 15, 2008 9:00:00 AM

Want to get an idea of what speed advantage adding an expensive hardware RAID card to your new server is likely to give you? You can benchmark the performance difference between running a RAID using the Linux kernel software RAID and a hardware RAID card. My own tests of the two alternatives yielded some interesting results.

Using spindown to prolong the life of old hard disks

Lee Schlesinger

April 22, 2008 4:00:00 PM

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning. There is a delicate balance between having a hard disk spinning down and up too frequently and leaving it spinning around the clock. If you have a filesystem that you want to have near instant access to but do so on an infrequent basis, you might like to use spindown to automatically spin down the disk containing that filesystem after you have finished accessing the drive.

eCos real-time OS makes short work of building a SAN appliance

Lee Schlesinger

November 28, 2007 9:00:00 PM

Compellent has been shipping its SAN appliances to small to medium-sized companies for three years, growing from $4 million in annual sales to more than $23 million last year. Part of the reason for that growth, says cofounder John Guider, is that Compellent executives have recognized the value of making an open source operating system one of the building blocks of the company's SAN offerings.

FreeNAS makes it easy to add storage to home networks

Lee Schlesinger

January 22, 2007 8:00:00 AM

FreeNAS is a small, powerful, full-featured implementation of FreeBSD as a network-attached storage device. (It also happens to be January's Project of the Month at SourceForge.net.) If you're a Linux user like me, the BSD-speak used for devices and such might give you pause, but other than that small caveat, installation and usage shouldn't be a problem. It's powerful enough to be used in the enterprise, but it's friendly enough so that even a typical home office user can take advantage of it. Here's how I created an easy-to-use NAS device for rsync backups and FTP server on my LAN.

Reduce network storage cost, complexity with ATA over Ethernet

Lee Schlesinger

July 03, 2006 8:00:00 AM

Today, Fibre Channel is the dominant enterprise storage technology, but as with all technologies, eventually something better comes along. If you're lucky, that something is also less complex and less expensive. For storage, that something may be ATA over Ethernet (AoE), a simple and open network protocol that allows storage to be accessed over Ethernet. Here's how you can set up a test server to provide shared storage using AoE.

A look at the FreeNAS server

Lee Schlesinger

May 30, 2006 8:00:00 AM

FreeNAS, an open source NAS server, can convert a PC into a network-attached storage server. The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media.

Add network storage with NASLite

Lee Schlesinger

April 19, 2006 8:00:00 AM

Network-attached storage (NAS) offers an alternative to traditional fileservers by creating systems designed specifically for data storage. A NAS box generally runs an embedded operating system (OS) rather than a full-fledged network OS, and it requires no monitor, keyboard, or mouse. One of the simplest NAS setups is Server Elements' NASLite.

Studio adds Lustre to Harry Potter films

Lee Schlesinger

January 04, 2006 8:00:00 AM

Framestore CFC, the animation studio responsible for much of the eerie special effects work in the latest installment of the Harry Potter film series, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," uses fast, powerful Intel-based Linux clusters in its render farm, but it was still running into problems because of bottlenecks with its Network File System servers. Accio Lustre -- an open source cluster file system called Lustre helped feed the studio's prodigious I/O appetite at a price point that keeps it competitive with larger organizations.

How GNU/Linux and Serial ATA RAID teamed up to save money

Jem Matzan

September 21, 2004 8:00:00 AM

Recently Mailroute, a company that provides virus and spam filtering for businesses, switched its GNU/Linux-based servers from SCSI to Serial ATA disks and saved itself a lot of money. The switchover wouldn't have been possible without Broadcom's new SATA RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) controller, the RAIDCore BC4852.

OpenIB Alliance: Broad range of companies have broader hopes for InfiniBand

CJ Preimesberger

July 02, 2004 8:00:00 AM

<ed by cp 6.22> Representatives of the OpenIB Alliance, launched recently with funding from Intel and aimed at unifying efforts to build on the InfiniBand high-performance computing interconnect technology, stress that their goal of a single software stack for deploying InfiniBand is intended for multiple operating systems, including Windows, HP-UX, AIX, and Linux.