Setting up your own NAS with FreeNAS 8.0.2

Flexible Storage

Article from ADMIN 08/2012

By Thomas Joos

Set up your own network attached storage system with minimum effort with the help of FreeNAS. Thanks to the ZFS filesystem, you have more flexible storage, which you can also provide via iSCSI.

Whether you need more storage space for your users or for a server, setting up network attached storage (NAS) is a popular approach. NAS is cheaper than a storage area network (SAN) and is particularly well suited to smaller environments or storage for backup systems.

Preconfigured and prebuilt appliances swamp the markets, all allowing administrators to integrate NAS storage into their networks by buying both the hardware and the software. However, in many cases, companies have working hardware and smaller servers that are due for replacement.

This type of system is perfect for setting up NAS because the technology itself doesn't pose any major hardware requirements. Even if you don't relish the idea of using these systems in production, you can still use a NAS system to install, for example, a cluster for test purposes, for training, or to document the installation of clusters in the data center.

In the open source world, the tool of choice here is FreeNAS, which lets administrators quickly set up an easy-to-use NAS system. Among other things, FreeNAS lets you set up storage as an iSCSI target. Targets can be shared on the network and used by Windows servers, for example. You could also wire up your NAS to an ESX server or vSphere, and the list of supported systems includes Apple computers.

Convenient

FreeNAS uses its own operating system, which makes the computer and its hard disks available on the network. In other words, you don't need to install the operating system first and then FreeNAS; this is a single-stop install. Management is done through a convenient web interface, but experts can also log in via SSH if needed.

Users can access the storage via SMB, NFS, CIFS, AFP, FTP and TFTP, RSYNC, and SCP. You can also integrate the NAS as an iSCSI target. The filesystems FreeNAS offers are UFS, ZFS, ext2/3, FAT, NTFSm, and RAID-Z. You can monitor the server with

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