d o l l m o n t . n e t

It’s long been a saying in this business: You can have it good, fast and cheap. Pick any two. That’s beginning to change on many levels, and the changes are starting to ripple outward.

Sun Fishworks aims to bring large volume NAS and SAN storage down to commodity pricing. They’re combining a lot of their different technologies and playing on all their strengths—most notably, Solaris. By combining the power of Solaris with low cost hardware, Sun is challenging companies like NetApp. With any luck, they’ll be able to pull it off from a marketing standpoint—an area of weakness at Sun.

The Fishworks philosophy is a great one—do more with less. I brought this home by building a NAS server for the house based around OpenSolaris and the MSI Wind PC.

OpenSolaris is installed on a 4 GB Compact Flash card that sits on the Wind PC’s motherboard. There are 2 500 GB hard drives—one in the hard drive bay and one in the optical drive bay via a 5.25 to 3.5 adapter. There is no optical drive. In this configuration you can install OpenSolaris via a USB optical drive or, like I did, via a USB thumb drive.

Once installed, the two disks are placed into a ZFS pool and, in my case, mirrored. It’s amazing how flexible and easy ZFS is to manage, particularly with the power it gives you. CIFS is now an in-kernel driver on OpenSolaris and managed via ZFS settings. Sharing volumes and directories is easy. Even NFS sharing for the Linux boxes on my network is a no-brainer.

I’m still tweaking and testing system performance, but once I’m done I’ll do a full writeup on the system. So far, it’s good, fast and cheap. Not bad at all…