Thursday, April 03, 2008

Developers, developers, developers...

Ever wanted that NAS on your own hardware, for free? Nexenta has finally released their NexentaStor Developer Edition 1.0, which is free version of their commercial product with only a 1TB limit on used storage. All functionality otherwise is there, unlimited. This is a near final release for the commercial version, but is the first version the general public can get and install on their own hardware.

The release represents many things, but the Developer releases are focused on more than just tire kicking or a free NAS product for your home NAS needs. Rather, there is a lot of potential to extend and use Nexenta's SA-API for storage service-enabled solutions. Wish to modify your DB to wrap a transaction in a snapshot? Need to automate separate file system creation, quotas, etc for your users? Registered users on the web site can look at an overview of the architecture and sample SA-API components. I expect much more in the way of API details in the near future. However, the release of the product is here today.

A general support forum is also available

There are two other automation aspects to NexentaStor that I haven't given much love to here. Both utilize the batch nature of NMC, the Nexenta Management Console. One is the 'query' functionality, which allows various introspections on the NAS and can query across multiple appliances at once if they are grouped together (the group function). In a similar vein, there is the NMC recording facility, which is handled by the "record" command. Recording allows you to save and play back actions for various tasks, including over a network of NAS devices. All of these commands have ready examples available by invoking the command with the "-h" help argument in the console. There is also good stuff in the User Guide which is available for download.

2 comments:

instoremarketer said...

Hi Joe, thanks for commenting about Nexenta at Docunext. I was wondering if you could recommend a cheap mainboard which works with NexentaCP. I tried the intel d201gly and while it seems to the network driver was dying on me. I got it to work with a usb nic, but that isn't strong enough for me to evaluate the system over a few months.

jmlittle@gmail.com (Joe Little) said...

I've had luck with various Opteron MBs (Asus, MSI, etc). Both the broadcom and intel network chipsets should just work, but alas there is always some quark. The most success has come from the various AMD and Intel variants of supermicro MBs.

Followers