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Openfiler

Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs. Building upon the popularity of server virtualization technologies such as VMware, Virtual Iron, and Xen, Openfiler can also be deployed as a virtual machine instance.

This deployment flexibility of Openfiler ensures that storage administrators are able to make the best use of system performance and storage capacity resources when allocating and managing networked storage in a multi-platform environment.

Openfiler addresses all the key data storage concerns:

  • Reliability - Openfiler supports both software and hardware RAID with monitoring and alert facilities; volume snapshot and recovery
  • Availability - Openfiler supports active/passive high availability clustering, MPIO, and block level replication
  • Performance - Linux 2.6 kernel supports the latest CPU, networking and storage hardware
  • Scalability - filesystem scalability to 60TB+, online filesystem and volume growth support

Openfiler Architecture

Feature Summary

Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI (target and initiator), scheduled snapshots, resource quota, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.

The following are just some of the features currently available (unless indicated otherwise) in Openfiler.

  • Powerful block storage virtualization
    • Full iSCSI target support, with support for virtual iSCSI targets for optimal division of storage
    • Extensive volume and physical storage management support
    • Support for large block devices
    • Full software RAID management support
    • Support for multiple volume groups for optimal storage allocation
    • Online volume size and overlying filesystem expansion
    • Point-in-time snapshots support with scheduling
    • Volume usage reporting
    • Synchronous / asynchronous volume migration & replication (manual setup necessary currently)
    • iSCSI initiator (manual setup necessary currently)
  • Extensive share management features
    • Support for multiple shares per volume
    • Multi-level share directory tree
    • Multi-group based access control on a per-share basis
    • Multi-host/network based access control on a per-share basis
    • Per-share service activation (NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP with read/write controls)
    • Support for auto-created SMB home directories
    • Support for SMB/CIFS "shadow copy" feature for snapshot volumes
    • Support for public/guest shares
  • Accounts management
    • Authentication using Pluggable Authentication Modules, configured from the web-interface
    • NIS, LDAP, Hesiod, Active Directory (native and mixed modes), NT4 domain controller
    • Guest/public account support
  • Quota / resource allocation
    • Per-volume group-quota management for space and files
    • Per-volume user-quota management for space and files
    • Per-volume guest-quota management for space and files
    • User and group templates support for quota allocation
  • Other features
    • UPS management support
    • Built-in SSH client Java applet
  • Full industry-standard protocol suite
    • CIFS/SMB support for Microsoft Windows-based clients
    • NFSv3 support for all UNIX clients with support for ACL protocol extensions
    • NFSv4 support (testing)
    • FTP support
    • WebDAV and HTTP 1.1 support
    • Linux distribution back-end for any other customizations
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Last Updated ( Friday, 16 January 2009 00:13 )