custom NAS appliance without the hack

[Ben Eisenbraun]

On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 05:55:23PM -0400, Tom Metro wrote:
> The author of that comparison concludes that OpenFiler generally 
> performs better, and being a more complete distribution (that includes 
> debugging tools) is easier to administer. But it's two years old, and I 
> think FreeNAS is now available in a more complete form than just the 32 
> MB version he used. He also makes no mention of ZFS (which wasn't 
> available then), instead using UFS for the file system, which could have 
> negatively impacted performance.

I didn't think ZFS was known to be very fast.  I thought that flexibility
and reliability were supposed to be its selling points.

> Nexenta Systems sells a commercial NAS OS that I've read is based on a 
> OpenSolaris kernel (w/ZFS) and Linux user space (don't know which, if 
> any, distribution it resembles).

Their standalone OS product, NexentaOS, is Debian-based, so that would be
my guess.  It looks pretty interesting to me, although I haven't tried it
out since I don't have any hardware well suited to OpenSolaris.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexenta

> There's a project to combine the FreeBSD kernel with Debian user space:

Yuck.  That never seemed like much of a win to me.  That project has been 
around for a while and they're only just now getting a base system into the 
Debian repos, so I guess other people agree.  :-)

-ben

--
you'll find that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and 
that's hardly worth the effort.                    <norton juster>