NexentaStor ZFS Based Storage Appliance
Posted by Sam
Anybody that knows me knows that I think ZFS is the best thing since sliced bread. As far as file systems go it's pretty much the best thing to come along in years, maybe decades. I've tried to evangelize it to my Windows brothers but asking them to switch to Solaris for a file system seems to be too much to ask for and it seems unlikely that Microsoft would ever be as progressive as Apple and include it in the operating system. Instead they will no doubt try to clone it, spending millions of dollars in the progress and still ending up trailing ZFS. Ok, enough ranting about the boring giant that is Microsoft. They haven't done anything interesting in years.
NexentaStor takes OpenSolaris and ZFS and packages it up into a neat little NAS appliance complete with a web based GUI for controlling NFS, CIFS (SAMBA), iSCSI, FTP and ZFS snapshots. You provide the hardware and the drives and Nexenta provides the software for running the NAS.
Nexenta provides a free VMware image that you can use to install and test NexentaStor. It appears to be a full featured copy. If you want to run NexentaStor on a physical server you have to purchase it from Nexenta. They don't provide any pricing on their site currently, but I'm sure it will be very cost effective. I've seen pretty poor network performance with Solaris on VMware ESX servers so I don't recommend running NexentaStor on VMware if you require the best performance, but it's great for trying out the product before you buy.
Installing and running NexentaStor was extremely easy under VMware Fusion on my MacBook. I had it running within 30 minutes with no real problems. I've got CIFS and FTP up and running but I haven't been able to get NFS running so far. Also, I'd like to play with joining it to an AD domain. This feature would be great for Windows admins looking for the rock solid reliability of Solaris and ZFS without requiring Windows admins to learn Solaris and everything that goes along with that. For a product that isn't even a 1.0 product it looks pretty amazing so far. I look forward to playing with NexentaStor some more in the future.
Tags: zfs