planckscale's Journal: NexentaStor iSCSI Virtual NAS/SAN

I found NexentaStor which is a virtual NAS/SAN product built on solaris. It uses zfs and has a theoretical storage capacity of 16 petabytes. The free version allows up to 6TB of storage. zfs is an amazing filing system and has many features I'm just beginning to grasp, but it is very fault tolerant. Essentially NexentaStor is simply a vmware virtual machine that you can run on anything that vmware server will run on. You use vmware virtual hard drives to create your volumes and then the NexentaStor software to create zpools and targets. It has a great web interface and graphs. Also, if you have another NexentaStor NAS, you can create an autosync connection where only the data that's changed goes over the wire, and other fault tolerance features. Using big boxes offsite could eliminate backups to tape if only for archival purposes. I guess Stanford uses the software for their graphic arts dept. Because the NAS is virtual, moving it to better hardware in the future seems painless, rather than having to rely on an Adaptec warranty.

You could have the free NextentaStor NAS, running on free VMWare Server, running on a free linux box, where the only thing you pay for is hardware. Plus you have a hugely robust web-based software solution probably much better than Adaptec's software.

I see it as a proprietary iscsi killer, but then again, the server is only as good as the hardware it's running on and I'm not sure someone could build the same grade hardware as Adaptec...