Product Reviews

They may offer a quick fix to network storage problems, but NAS appliances, certainly at the enterprise level, have often been criticised for being expensive. If this rankles then it may be easier and cheaper to build one yourself, and we're now starting to see several software NAS solutions for just this purpose. The basic premise is simple - you choose your hardware and load the application on top of it. For SMEs, AMI's StorTrends NAS software, as used in the StorTrends 2104, is a good example, but Zetta Server has taken the idea into the enterprise to tackle the big boys, such as Network Appliance, where prices are nothing less than stratospheric.

Installation of Zetta Server is quite remarkable and can be achieved easily in less than ten minutes. Just about any Intel-based platform is supported - we chose a Pentium III/866 system with 1GB of RAM, and equipped with a pair of 9GB Ultra160 hard disks linked to an embedded Adaptec Ultra160 chipset. The first task is to download the single ISO image file and burn yourself a bootable CD, which we easily achieved using the Ahead Nero utility. You then boot the donor system with the disc, whereupon it wipes all the hard disks, loads its own Linux kernel and asks for basic details, such as a domain and IP address information. This is a swift process and

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then you can move over to remote management via a web browser. This provides a simple wizard that confirms the network details, allows you to add an email address for alert notification and asks how the hard disks are to be set up. You can use a hardware RAID controller, but Zetta Server also supports software-based RAID-0, -1, -10 and -5 arrays, so we opted for a simple mirror for fault tolerance.

The main browser interface is a cheerful affair with chunky buttons for each function. However, this, along with the juvenile messages regarding licensing, won't cut any ice with network administrators. With CIFS and NFS support, both Windows and Unix clients can access the appliance and it integrates with both NT domain authentication and Active Directory.

Share creation for each type of client is simple enough and security options are good. You can allow access based on user login, group membership, IP address and network. Soft and hard disk quotas control storage on a per-user basis and the soft mode allows users to exceed their limit for seven days before being blocked. Data-protection features are good too, as snapshots take point-in-time copies of the entire appliance and these can be scheduled to run as often as once an hour. The ZDitto tool is even more powerful, as it allows entire appliances to be replicated over a LAN or WAN to another system running Zetta Server.

Small businesses may be interested in the free Lite version, even though 30 days after installation it loses network redundant link support and replication, allows one snapshot per day and only operates in workgroup mode. Large companies balking at high prices will find the full version a worthy alternative, although at the SME level you should first consider products such as the Snap Appliances Snap Server 4500, as these complete NAS solutions are better value and offer an equally broad feature set.