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General Information
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October 19, 2007
• Vol.29 Issue 42
Page(s) 12 in print issue
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Low-Cost Storage Tools
Open-Source Projects Provide Increasing Choices
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 Demands for storage continue to increase, even as the technological complexities of running a data center multiply, leaving IT departments and data center managers in businesses of all sizes looking for assistance in improving efficiencies and reducing management headaches. A growing number of mostly open-source-based storage tools are available for free or for a minimal subscription fee that can help bridge that gap and provide businesses with storage alternatives.
 Amanda
Originally developed at the University of Maryland's Computer Science Department, Amanda (the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver; www.amanda.org) is a backup software and archiving system. The software is now maintained at SourceForge.net, an open-source development site, and more than 250 developers have contributed code to the project.
Amanda allows a business to set up a single master server that can back up multiple Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and Windows hosts. The data can be backed up to a wide array of tape, disks, and optical devices, such as tape libraries, autochangers, optical jukeboxes, RAID arrays, and NAS devices.
Amanda is well documented and can be set up easily. It has the capability of writing backups to tape and disk simultaneously, allowing the data to be available online from disk and offsite for disaster recovery or archiving. Amanda uses native dump or GNU tar utilities, allowing data to be recovered with native utilities regardless of whether it is still installed.
FreeNAS
Designed around a FreeBSD base and backed by an active community, FreeNAS (www.freenas.org) is a mature open-source network-attached storage server. It includes a wide range of protocol support, including CIFS (Samba), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), NFS (Network File System), AFP (Apple Filing Protocol), S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), local user authentication, and software RAID.
FreeNAS takes less than 32MB to install on CompactFlash, a hard drive, or a USB flash drive. Users can also run FreeNAS from a Live CD, which is an OS distribution executed upon boot without installation on a hard drive. A VMware disk image is also available. It has a full Web configuration interface, and users can download the software at SourceForge.net.
NASLite
The Linux-based software fits onto a 1.44MB floppy disk, creating a way to turn an old computer into a NAS system. The software supports serving files to clients that are using Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X.
Because file serving takes up only a minimal processor overhead, NASLite is able to run on older computers that have at least a 486-level processor. SourceForge.net has more information and support for NASLite, and NASLite floppy disk images are available to download for free at the Server Elements Web site (serverelements.com) or SourceForge.net.
NASLite supports large hard drives that older computers may not support by bypassing the BIOS and accessing the hard drive directly, which can make older equipment more useful by serving substantial data amounts.
Openfiler
Openfiler (www.openfiler.com) is a storage management operating system created by Xinit Systems (www.xinit.com), a specialist in Linux and open-source products. The software can be used to build NAS and SAN appliances that are based on leading storage networking protocols.
It is distributed as a standalone Linux distribution, and the software stack interfaces with third-party software that is all open source. File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB (Server Message Block)/CIFS (Common Internet File System), HTTP/WebDAV, and FTP. Openfiler supports network directories, including NIS (Network Information Service), LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes), and Hesiod.
Openfiler also includes support for volume-based partitioning; iSCSI (target and initiator); scheduled snapshots; resource quota; and a single unified interface for share management, which simplifies the process of allocating shares for different network file system protocols.
Areca Backup
File backup software developed in Java, Areca Backup supports archive compression in ZIP format and archives in Triple DES (Data Encryption Standard) and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption algorithms. Backup can be filtered by extension, subdirectory, regular expression, size, data, status, or usage. Available through SourceForge.net, Areca has two user interfaces available, a command-line interface for backup automation and a graphical user interface for general administration tasks. 
by Darrell Dunn
Noteworthy Tool
The ZFS (Zettabyte File System) was introduced with Sun Microsystems’ (www.sun.com) release of Solaris 10 and was subsequently made available to the open-source community at OpenSolaris.org. ZFS provides simple administration, transactional semantics, scalability, and data integrity that is guaranteed by the file system.
ZFS is a pooled storage model that does away with the ideas of volumes and the associated problems or partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth, and stranded storage. A common storage pool can provide for thousands of file systems, with each one taking up only as much space as it needs, while the combined I/O bandwidth remains available to all file systems.
All operations are copy-on-write transactions, and the on-disk state is always valid. Data is self-healing in replicated mirrored or RAID configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS detects which one it is and then uses another copy to repair it. The system uses a new data replication model called RAID-Z that has full-stripe writes, eliminating the need for read-modify-write and nonvolatile RAM in hardware. |
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