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Ever wanted to play with a Network Attached Storage device?  Is your team looking for some place to store files, images, injects, VMs?  Have an old desktop/server and a few drives lying around and nothing to do on them?  Consider building out your own SAN.  While you can easily pick up some lower end SAN devices for less than $1,000 there are at least two solutions  that will allow you to build a dedicated SAN using hardware you already have laying around:  FreeNAS and Openfiler.  FreeNAS and Openfiler are software solutions that allow you, in most cases, to take your existing hardware and turn it into a full-featured network storage solution supporting iSCSI, NFS, SMB, AFP, etc.  And you can get them for free.

FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/) is a free, open source, network-attached storage operating system based on FreeBSD that includes a web interface, command line interface, support for 10GigE devices, snapshots, replication, and so on.  The software is downloaded as ISO that you than burn with your favorite burning software to create a bootable CD.  Openfiler (www.openfiler.com) is available in both free and paid versions, includes a web interface, support for 10GigE devices, replication, and so on.  The software is available as an ISO as well as pre-built VMWare and Xen virtual appliances.

Both products are fairly simple to install from their ISO versions.  Burn the CD, boot from it, and follow the prompts.  If you’ve ever installed an operating system, this process will be very familiar to you and you can have the basic system up and running in very little time.  The big question you’ll need to answer is what will you use your newly created SAN for?  Let’s face it, network storage is fun to play with but it can also be useful.  Here are some things to consider:

  • iSCSI target for ESX server:  Both products support the creation of iSCSI targets that are can be used as datastores for ESX servers.  This is especially useful when storing many VMs or using VMs with multiple snapshots.
  • NFS:  Both products support NFS which would give your team a network storage capability to share files, folders, and so on.  You can even share CD/DVD drives via NSF.
  • Directory Services:  You can configure your NAS to use authentication services such as LDAP or Active Directory.

Of course performance of your NAS is heavily dependent on the hardware you are using.  Neither solution is very CPU or memory intensive but performance for each is heavily influenced by the NICs and hard drives you are using.  The good news is that even with a single 7200 RPM SATA II or III drive and a gigabit NIC you can get acceptable performance out of either of these products.  And both options support capabilities such as NIC teaming to increase throughput.  So if you’re looking for a network storage solution to use in your CCDC preparation activities, consider giving FreeNAS and/or Openfiler a try.

 

@NationalCCDC