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Don't forget FreeNas

Posted on 5 Aug 2010 at 11:46

Steve Cassidy explains why FreeNAS is worth investigating

FreeNAS is a public-domain NAS software solution that starts out from FreeBSD, a less popular but possibly better-pedigreed free version of Unix.

It would be pointless to just list everything that FreeNAS does here, given that there’s an uncommonly clear Wikipedia page about it, so I’ll assume you’ve read that and now want to know why I’ve brought this up alongside a conversation about dying disk drives.

FreeNAS is worth investigating because it supports both of the two recent innovations that can raise storage usefully above the level of its misbehaving basic building blocks; a FreeNAS server can serve up and participate in a Zettabyte Filing System (ZFS) configuration, and it can act as either an iSCSI target (that is, presenting logical drives to a host or aggregation server) or as an iSCSI initiator (that is, collecting together a group of targets on some reachable subnet into a single large logical storage volume).

Add to that the FreeNAS web management interface, which is a piece of cool and coherent design that wouldn’t shame a premium-priced commercial product, and things start to become interesting indeed (although, as usual with free, crowd-sourced software, various high-profile technologies are thrown in the pot without being fully and comfortably integrated into the whole).

Many people believe that ZFS is the way of the future when it comes to really large storage systems, and there’s certainly a case to be made for running up a copy of FreeNAS merely to familiarise yourself with its concepts and components – but if you do, you’ll have to live with a few warnings to the effect that ZFS isn’t fully supported by FreeNAS. Yet.

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