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Nexenta NAS

Nexenta is particularly well-suited as (home/enterprise) NAS (because of ZFS, but not only).

It can easily, out of the box:

  • store huge amounts of data
  • store it reliably (thanks to ZFS' COW nature and RAIDZ, ... did I say huge amounts?)
  • store it efficiently (deduplication, compression, ...)
  • share it using NFS, SMB(CiFS), iSCSI, FTP, SFTP, and more...
  • keep history of it (thanks to snapshots)
  • run server applications (Web, Java, ...)

All of this with the power of APT (Debian rules!), so hassle-free package installation, removal and upgrade.

If several disks are present in the machine at installation time, the installer will ask you if you want to mirror (up to 3-way) the system disks. In this case, any disk failing would never bring the service down. As simple as that. Of course, any additional disk might be used as storage later on.

This all makes it particularly well-suited as NAS (as you were told previously). And several derived distributions are already building on it. NexentaStor is one of them, but you might consider using Napp-it as well.

Sharing data for Windows and Mac clients

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