SAN/NAS – 10 FREE STORAGE APPLIANCES

Lingesh

11 years ago

Storage virtualization brought many advanced features to SAN/NAS world.SAN/NAS appliance moved one step forward and made any system can be act as virtual SAN/NAS box.For an example using openfiler, you can provision LUNS and assign to any server using ISCIS protocol.The same way it can act like NAS filer as well.Here I have list down the SAN/NAS appliance which are industry leading products.You can download it freely and install it.

These products are being used in many organization and very reliable products in data storage. It supports SNMP,SMARTS and syslog for monitoring.So failure can easily detected and notified to administrators.In UnixArena,I have used openfiler to setup VCS cluster between two Solaris nodes.

Products

Description

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Openfiler

Openfiler is one of the most reliable SAN/NAS appliance which runs on Linux Operating system.

Product Highlights:
1.Unified storage: NAS/SAN
2.iSCSI target functionality
3.CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP Protocols
4.RAID 0,1,5,6,10 support
5.Bare metal or virtualization installation
6.8TB+ Journaled filesystems
7.Filesystem Access Control Lists
8.Point In Time Copy (snapshots) support
9.Dynamic volume manager
10.Powerful web-based management
11.Block level remote replication
12.High Availability clustering

FreeNAS

FreeNAS is very light weight SAN/NAS
appliance which is based on Free BSD.It uses ZFS in the backend.

Product Highlights:
1.Replication
2.Data Protection
3.Encryption
4.Snapshots (ZFS based)
5.File Sharing (FTP,NFS,AFP,SMB/CIFS)
6.Web User Interface
7.Support Plugins

OpenMediaVault

OpenMediaVault is the NAS appliance
based on Debian Linux.

Product Highlights:
1.Easy system updates via Debian package management.
2.Scheduled jobs
3.Plugins-LVM,LDAP,AFP,Antivirus
4.Link aggregation
5.EXT3/EXT4/XFS/JFS filesystem support
6.Software RAID JBOD/0/1/5/6
7.Quota (per volume)
8.Monitoring-Syslog
9.SNMP (v1/2c/3) (read-only)
10.RSync/NFS/SMB-CIFS/FTP/TFTP

Open-E DSS

Open-E DSS V7 is a fully featured NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) software platform. NAS offers support for multiple file protocols which enable you to build cross-platform solutions and SAN offers iSCSI Target and Fibre Channel Target functionalities.

Product Highlights:
1.Active-Active Failover (Feature Pack)
2.Active-Passive Failover
3.Full Hyper-V Cluster Support
4.Volume Replication
5.Snapshots
6.Continuous Data Protection
7.Storage Virtualization
8.VMware Ready and Citrix Ready

NASLite

NASLite-2 provides NAS services to Windows, Apple OSX, UNIX and other clients via SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, FTP, HTTP and RSYNC protocols simultaneously.

Product Highlights:
1.HTML-based status report pages
2.Extremely compact in size (Runs in a 16MB RAM Disk)
3.Minimal hardware requirements
4.Based on the Linux 2.6 Kernel
5.S.M.A.R.T. support
6.Remote NFS volumes re-export
7.Support for IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB and FireWire connected fixed disk drives
8.SMB/CIFS, NFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP and RSYNC exported file systems
9.Remote administration through Telnet
10.Dependable hardware RAID card support

NexentaStor

NexentaStor is a fully featured SAN/NAS appliance which is based ZFS filesystem.This can be implement in Cisco UCS as well.

Product Highlights:
1.Supports Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
2.HA Cluster Plug-in
3.Data Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity using ZFS features
4.Uses ZFS Snapshots and Replication
5.Auto-Tiered Storage
6.Supports ZFS Copy-on-Write, Checksums, and Consistency

NAPP-IT

NAPP-IT also based ZFS which can be installed on standard hardware’s.

Product Highlights:
1.WEB-MANAGED Interface
2.Pre-Install USB Stick
3.Free End User Edition
4.Supports Plugins

ZFS-GURU

ZFSguru is SAN/NAS appliance which is specially designed for reliable data storage. ZFSguru is based on FreeBSD, an advanced UNIX operating system.

Product Highlights:
1.Available in LIVE CD
2.sector size override feature
3.Enhance the data security
4.Advanced Sharing
5.Easily upgrade the web-interface

Starwind

Starwind is a software which can be used to convert winodws operating system as SAN/NAS appliance.Its manily targeting VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix.

Product Highlights:
1.Thin provisioning
2.High speed caching
3.Global deduplication
4.CDP & Snapshots
5.High Availability
6.Unlimited storage capacity for a single-node device
7.Seamless integration with VM Backup solutions

FalconStor NSS

Falconstor is a scalable, highly available solution that enables storage virtualization and business continuity in heterogeneous environments.

Product Highlights:
1.Open Architecture
2.Automated DR with RecoverTrac Technology
3.Advanced Mirroring
4.Complete Data Mobility
5.Thin Provisioning
6.Any-to-any Data Replication
7.WAN-optimized Replication
8.P2V Recovery
9.Accelerate Backup to Tape
10.VMWARE & Hyper-V support

Thank you for reading this article.

Note:All the images are belongs to product vendors.