The FreeNAS distribution is tailor-made for installation in a small office environment. It is an extremely low-resource network storage system that you can administer through a Web browser, but it supports high-end features like automatic backups, replication, LDAP or Active Directory authentication, and seamless file-sharing over NFS, CIFS, AFP, and even FTP and TFTP. The latest release — version 8.0 — is just a few weeks old, and it is the perfect time to take a look.
A Bird's-Eye View
For those new to FreeNAS, it is important to realize that the system is designed to be lean and mean by eliminating all other server functionality. That is, FreeNAS will give you high-end storage features, but it will not double as a Web server, authentication server, or any other piece of IT infrastructure. However, you can run FreeNAS on older or off-the-shelf PC hardware and attach far more storage per dollar than you would ever get in from a commercial storage appliance. By switching off all of the unnecessary server and OS components, the FreeNAS team manages to get incredible speed out of the operating system, and fit the entire image into a compact package — the latest release fits into 64 MB.
In fact, FreeNAS can run from non-volatile, compact flash storage, so you can save every byte of your hard disks for files. The core of the system is derived from the open sourceFreeBSD project, heavily customized with the NanoBSD embedded image creator. It can even be configured to run as a read-only system image, so that there is no danger of losing customizations in the event of a power loss.
The preferred filesystem for storage volumes is ZFS, a high-capacity filesystem with built-in support for snapshots, copy-on-write transactions, and logical volume management. It originated in Sun's OpenSolaris, but has since been ported to other operating systems. ZFS volumes can be fully managed from the Web admin interface, and FreeNAS can manage multiple file sharing protocols concurrently, for compatibility with Unix-like networks, Windows, and Mac OS X. For those not interested in ZFS, the older UFS filesystem is supported as well.
Hardware support is a given; any type of drive will work, from parallel ATA up through FireWire and iSCSI, in heterogeneous combinations. Hardware RAID controllers are also supported, as is software RAID. The current list of RAID levels includes 0, 1, 5, JBOD, 5+0, 5+1, 0+1, 1+0, and even RAID-Z. Disk encryption is also supported, and monitoring is available via SNMP, email reporting, and remote logging.
Installation and Setup
Read more http://blogmee.info/index.php/freenas-8-0-simplifies-storage/
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