Category Archives: NAS

Give back or no give

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[ Disclosure: I work for iXsystems™ Inc. Views and opinions are my own. ]

If my memory served me right, I recalled the illustrious leader of the Illumos project, Garrett D’Amore ranting about companies, big and small, taking OpenZFS open source codes and projects to incorporate into their own technology but hardly ever giving back to the open source community. That was almost 6 years ago.

My thoughts immediately go back to the days when open source was starting to take off back in the early 2000s. Oracle 9i database had just embraced Linux in a big way, and the book by Eric S. Raymond, “The Cathedral and The Bazaar” was a big hit.

The Cathedral & The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

Since then, the blooming days of proprietary software world began to wilt, and over the next twenty plus year, open source software has pretty much taken over the world. Even Microsoft®, the ruthless ruler of the Evil Empire caved in to some of the open source calls. The Microsoft® “I Love Linux” embrace definitely gave the victory feeling of the Rebellion win over the Empire. Open Source won.

Open Source bag of worms

Even with the concerted efforts of the open source communities and projects, there were many situations which have caused frictions and inadvertently, major issues as well. There are several open source projects licenses, and they are not always compatible when different open source projects mesh together for the greater good.

On the storage side of things, 2 “incidents” caught the attention of the masses. For instance, Linus Torvalds, Linux BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) and emperor supremo said “Don’t use ZFS” partly due to the ignorance and incompatibility of Linux GPL (General Public License) and ZFS CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). That ruffled some feathers amongst the OpenZFS community that Matt Ahrens, the co-creator of the ZFS file system and OpenZFS community leader had to defend OpenZFS from Linus’ comments.

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FreeNAS 11.2 & 11.3 eBook

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[ Full disclosure: I work for iXsystems™ Inc. This eBook was 3/4 completed when I joined on July 1, 2020 ]

I am releasing my FreeNAS™ eBook today. It was completed about 4 weeks ago, but I wanted the release date to be significant which is August 31, 2020.

FreeNAS logo

Why August 31st? Because today is Malaysia’s Independence Day.

Why the book?

I am an avid book collector. To be specific, IT and storage technology related books. Since I started working on FreeNAS™ several years ago, I wanted to find a book to learn. But the FreeNAS™ books in the market are based on an old version of FreeNAS™. And the FreeNAS™ documentation is a User Guide where it explains every feature without going deeper with integration of real life networking services, and situational applications such as SMB or NFS client configuration.

Since I have been doing significant amount of feature “testings” of FreeNAS™ from version 9.10 till the present version 11,3 on Virtualbox™, I have decided to fill that gap. I have decided to write a cookbook-style FreeNAS™ on Virtualbox™ that covers most of the real-life integration work with various requirements including Active Directory, cloud integration and so on. All for extending beyond the FreeNAS™ documentation.

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The instant value of Open Source Storage

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[ Full disclosure: I work for iXsystems™ . Opinions and views are mine. ]

TrueNAS Open Storage logo

The story began …

It was 2011. A friend of a friend called me out of the blue. He was rambling about his company’s storage needs. I recalled vividly that he wanted 100TB, and Dell and HP (before HPE) were hopeless doing NAS (network attached storage) in an Apple environment. They assembled a Frankenstein-ish NAS and plastered a price over MYR$100K around it.

In his environment, the Apple workstations were connected to dozens of WD Cloud Book storage (whatever it was called back then), daisy chained via Firewire to each other. I recalled one workstation had 3 WD “books” daisy chained together. They got the exploding storage needs but performance sucked. With every 2nd or 3rd user, access to files were at a snail pace, taking up to more than 2 minutes to open a file sometimes.

At that time, my old colleague at Sun was fervently talking about ZFS and OpenSolaris™. I told him about this opportunity, and so we began. It was him who used the word “crafter”. “We are not building“, he said, “we are crafting“. He was right.

OpenSolaris logo

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Valuing the security value of NAS storage

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Garmin paid, reportedly millions. Do you sleep well at night knowing that the scourge of ransomware is rampant and ever threatening your business. Is your storage safe enough or have you invested in a storage which was the economical (also to be known as cheap) to your pocket?

Garmin was hacked by ransomware

I have highlighted this before. NAS (Network Attached Storage) has become the goldmine for ransomware. And in the mire of this COVID-19 pandemic, the lackadaisical attitude of securing the NAS storage remains. Too often than not, end users and customers, especially in the small medium enterprises segment, continue to search for the most economical NAS storage to use in their business.

Is price the only factor?

Why do customers and end users like to look at the price? Is an economical capital outlay of a cheap NAS storage with 3-year hardware and shallow technical support that significant to appease the pocket gods? Some end users might decided to rent cloud file storage, Hotel California style until they counted the 3-year “rental” price.

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The True Value of TrueNAS CORE

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A funny thing came up on my Twitter feed last week. There was an ongoing online voting battle pitting FreeNAS™ (now shall be known as TrueNAS® CORE) against Unraid. I wasn’t aware of it before that and I would not comment about Unraid because I have no experience with the software. But let me share with you my philosophy and my thoughts why I would choose TrueNAS® CORE over Unraid and of course TrueNAS® Enterprise along with it. We have to bear in mind that TrueNAS® SCALE is in development and will soon be here next year in 2021.

The new TrueNAS CORE logo

The real proving grounds

I have been in enterprise storage for a long time. If I were to count the days I entered the industry, that was more than 28 years ago. When people talked about their first PC (personal computer), they would say Atari or Commodore 64, or something retro that was meant for home use. Not me.

My first computer I was affiliated with was a SUN SPARC®station 2 (SS2). I took it home (from the company I was working with), opened it apart, and learned about the SBUS. My computer life started with a technology that was meant for the businesses, for the enterprise. Heck, I even installed and supported a few of the Sun E10000 for 2 years when I was with Sun Microsystems. Since that SS2, my pursuit of knowledge, experience and worldview evolved around storage technologies for the enterprise.

Open source software has also always interested me. I tried a few file systems including Lustre®, that parallel file system that powered some of the world’s supercomputers and I am a certified BeeGFS® Systems Engineer too. In the end, for me, and for many, the real proving grounds isn’t on personal and home use. It is about a storage systems and an OS that are built for the enterprise.

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Resilient Integrated Data Protection against Ransomware

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Early in the year, I wrote about NAS systems being a high impact target for ransomware. I called NAS a goldmine for ransomware. This is still very true because NAS systems are the workhorses of many organizations. They serve files and folders and from it, the sharing and collaboration of Work.

Another common function for NAS systems is being a target for backups. In small medium organizations, backup software often direct their backups to a network drive in the network. Even for larger enterprise customers too, NAS is the common destination for backups.

Backup to NAS system

Typical NAS backup for small medium organizations.

Backup to Data Domain with NAS Protocols

Backup to Data Domain with NAS (NFS, CIFS) Protocols

Ransomware is obviously targeting the backup as another high impact target, with the potential to disrupt the rescue and the restoration of the work files and folders.

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Glusterific!

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A conversation with a storage executive last week brought up Gluster, a clustered file system I have not explored in many years. I had one interaction months before its acquisition by RedHat® in 2011.

I remembered the Gluster demo at Jaring over a video call, because I was the lead consultant pitching the scale-out NAS solution. It did not go well, and there were “bugs” which made the Head of IT flinched in her seat. Despite Jaring being Malaysia’s technology trailblazer, the impression of Gluster was forgettable. I stayed on the GlusterFS architecture a little while and then it dropped off my radar.

Gluster Logo Scale Out NAS

Gluster Scale Out NAS

But after the conversation last week, I am elated to revive my interest in Gluster, knowing that something big and impressive in coming into the fore very soon. Studying the architecture (again!), there are 2 parts of Gluster which excite me. One is the Brick and the other is the lack of a Metadata service.

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A Dialogue between 2 Drives

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I was talking to an end user who was slowly getting exposed to the cloud amid this Covid-19 pandemic. The whole work from home thingy was not new to him, but the scale of the practice suddenly escalated when more than 80 of his staff have to work from wherever they were stuck at during the past 6 weeks. Initially all of his staff had to alternate their folders and files access because their Sonicwall® Global Client license and SSL VPN Clients were inadequate. Even after their upgrade of the licenses, the performance of getting the folders and files through the Z: drive was poor and the network was chocked up. I told them that regardless, the SMB protocol of the NAS shared folders was chatty and generated a lot of network traffic on the VPN, along with the inadequacies of running this over the wide area Internet network. Staff productivity obviously nosedived.

We are now exploring putting their work in the cloud but maintaining a consistent synchronized set of folders and files at all times. Wasabi® Cloud has emerged the most attractive price/GB/month and no egress or API requests fees.

Combining 2 shared drives into one

NAS Drive talking to Cloud Drive like 2 buddies

Now here is a story of 2 Drives

The end user is not an IT savvy user. They were unfamiliar with Cloud Storage other than the free personal ones like Google Drive, or Dropbox. They have more than 200TB and I have introduced to them Wasabi® Cloud. They were very familiar with their Z:, their NAS Drive. I introduced to them the Cloud Drive.

NAS: Hey, how’s it going?

Cloud: Not bad. My boss and your boss are talking about bringing me and Wasabi® Cloud to join your gang. Hope you are OK with that.

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Cloud Sync Prowess of FreeNAS

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The COVID-19 situation has driven technology to find new ways to adapt to the new digital workspace. Difficulty in remote access to content files and media assets has disrupted the workflow of the practitioners of many business segments. Many are trying to find ways to get the files and folders into their home computers and laptops to do work when they were used to getting them from the regular NAS shared drives.

These challenges have put hybrid cloud file sharing into the forefront, making it the best possible option to access the NAS folders and files inside and outside the boundaries of the company’s network. However, end users are pressured to invest into new technologies to adjust to this new normal. It does not have to be this way, because FreeNAS™ (and in that aspect TrueNAS®) has plenty of cloud help to offer. Most of the features are Free!

TrueNAS CORE

TrueNAS Core replacing FreeNAS in version 12.0

[ Note: FreeNAS™ will become TrueNAS® Core in the release 12. News was announced 2 months ago ]

FreeNAS™ Cloud Sync

One of the underrated features of FreeNAS™ is Cloud Sync. It was released in version 11.1 and it is invaluable extending the hybrid cloud file sharing to the masses. Cloud Sync makes the shares available to public cloud services such as AWS S3, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Microsoft Blob Storage, Microsoft OneDrive, pCloud, Wasabi™ Cloud and more. This means that the files and folders used within the NAS space in the LAN, can synchronized and used through the public cloud services mentioned.

There are 2 steps to setup Cloud Sync.

  • Add the Cloud Credentials for the cloud provider to use
  • Create the Cloud Sync Task

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Iconik Content Management Solutions with FreeNAS – Part 2

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[ Note: This is still experimental and should not be taken as production materials. I took a couple days over the weekend to “muck” around the new Iconik plug-in in FreeNAS™ to prepare for as a possible future solution. ]

This part is the continuation of Part 1 posted earlier.

iconik has partnered with iXsystems™ almost a year ago. iconik is a cloud-based media content management platform. Its storage repository has many integration with public cloud storage such as Google Cloud, Wasabi® Cloud and more. The on-premises storage integration is made through iconik storage gateway, and it presents itself to FreeNAS™ and TrueNAS® via plugins.

For a limited, you get free access to iconik via this link.

iconik  – The Application setup

[ Note: A lot of the implementation details come from this iXsystems™ documentation by Joe Dutka. This is an updated version for the latest 11.3 U1 release ]

iconik is feature rich and navigating it to setup the storage gateway can be daunting. Fortunately the iXsystems™ documentation was extremely helpful. It is also helpful to consider this as a 2-step approach so that you won’t get overwhelmed of what is happening.

  • Set up the Application section
    • Get Application ID
    • Get Authorization Token
  • Set up the Storage section
    • Get Storage ID

The 3 credentials (Application ID, Authorization Token, Storage ID) are required to set up the iconik Storage Gateway at the FreeNAS™ iconik plug-in setup.

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