NASLite Network Attached Storage

hello together,

I'm testing the freenas System (see http://www.freenas.org ) and I must say for at least 16MB on the Hard drive within Cifs, FTP, sshd, User Management, Raid and so on sounds very good for a 0.x Version (Including a VMWare Image and a working Dokumentation).

So, I could'nt read anything in the naslite V 2 Board here (why?) So I only could ask here what are the news about naslite. Are there planed WLAN Support, Raid, SATA Support, User management?

Version 2 is not out yet. Only the beta testers can read the version 2 forum right now.

From other posts in the various forums, the developers have said SATA will be supported along with hardware raid. The other features you ask about may or may not be supported.

I'm wrapping up my benchmarking for NASLite v2, I'll post the results when I get it in a viewable format.

I've benched v2 on 2 identical machines, (Dell Poweredge 1750-dual 2.7ghz zeons, 2gigs ram, 2x40GB SCSI Hardware Raid 1, GigE), crossover cabled (for no network latency), rebooting between tests etc for clean results. The client test box is running stock Slackware 10.2.

I've benched :

NASLite v2
FreeNAS 0.64
OpenFiler 1.x
Slackware 10.2
FreeBSD 6

Here's a snippet from my Diskwriggler tests using 500 HD frames under NFS. NASLite v2 is twice as fast as Freenas. Results are consistant with Samba as well.

Server Protocol Test Timing "+/-" (lower is better)

Naslite v2 NFS DW HD 500 Frames Write 78.58 Seconds
FreeNAS 0.64 NFS DW HD 500 Frames Write 181.51 Seconds +102.93

Naslite v2 NFS DW HD 500 Frames Read 66.44 Seconds
FreeNAS 0.64 NFS DW HD 500 Frames Read 147.22 Seconds+80.78

----

Naslite v2 Samba DW HD 500 Frames Write 180.42 Seconds
FreeNAS 0.64 Samba DW HD 500 Frames Write 342.14 Seconds +161.72

Naslite v2 Samba DW HD 500 Frames Read 66.44 Seconds
FreeNAS 0.64 Samba DW HD 500 Frames Read 394.53 Seconds +328.09

How about FreeNas vs. NASLite?

Hmmm... they even give you the ISO cd image for free....

Read Ralph's post again - slowly

Thanks for the benchmark info... certainly makes interesting reading.... But if you read the post carefully it says that these are the benchmarks for NasLite Version 2!! Which just raises the question..... When is version 2 coming?

What about some info on the progress with the beta test al least....

Beta has not been released to the beta testers yet. We'll anounce publicly when that happens.

Before releasing a beta, we prefer to perform our own load and stability testing, which I'm happy to say has proven that v2 is most definately worthy of the Server Elements name.

Ralph and I opted to add a number of items that were not planned for inclusion in the initial v2 release. That decision delayed beta testing, however we are close and hope to release very soon.

------------------------

P.S.

NASLite+ 1.5 and NASLite+ v1.5 for USB should produce network transfer results close to the v2 results. Although there is additional optimization, the NASLite-2 core is very much the same. The emphasis of NASLite-2 is mainly on additional functionality.

hmmmmhmhmhmhmh mmhmhmmhmhmhm grmmgmgmgmgmmmm

That is me resisting asking "WHEN!!??"

Good to hear that progress is going well and even some more features (hmmmmmhmhmhm grrrmmmph (resisting asking "WHAT FEATURES")) are being added to the release.....

Go the Beta testers! (hmmmmmhmhmhm grrrmmmph (resisting asking "CAN I BE A BETA TESTER??"))

So... NASlite V2 will be free to d-load and NASlit V2 + will be
the faster version for purchase?

I read sloooooowwwwly and still don't see a comparison
of the free version of NASlite compared against FreeNAS.

There are 6 free versions as follows: SMB, SMBG, NFS, NFSG, FTP and FTPG. All "G" versions will produce similar results as the "+" versions since those utilize chipset-specific ATA drivers. The Mbit versions use a generic IDE driver, so the speed is limited by disk read/write speed. Hope that helps

No offense guys you have a great product, but I am getting tried of waiting for V2. It seems as though you guys are about as slow as M$.

I will continue to use Nas-lite and probable V2 when it finally comes out but I am currently looking at Freenas and Puppy Linux with Samba installed.

Let me know when you finally get V2 out!

hy again,

so, here what I can read as facts so far:

Naslite 1:
+ ONE Disk Distribution
+ easy to handle
+ one disk for each "Type" (NFS, SMB, FTP
+ very fast
+ runs very good on old Hardware

- no Usermanagement
- only IDE Support
- no raid
- no journaling file system
- no WLAN
- No SATA

FreeNas 0.64:
+ raid implemented
+ user management
+ SSHD
+ installable on HDD, CF, USB
+ ralativ easy to install
+ CIFS (SAMBA), NFS AND FTP together
+ RADIUS and LDAP planned
+ VMWare Image available
+ real OpenSource Produkt
+ more then one NIC configurable
+ also WLAN Support
+ SCSI, IDE and further

- a bit slower
- "must" be installed

Naslite 2:
+ inovative whatever
+ very fast

- closed Beta testing
- no further Information

Questions:
- will naslite 2 also be free?
- what Inovativs where given in naslite 2?
- why is the discussion about the beta testings closed? why couldnt we participate to that?
- why is there so less Information about news (Mailinglist, Newsletter, etc.)?

Naslite for me is a great Product, but I see more benefits through Freenas (yet). What could the Developers say to that?
Dont understand me wrong! I don't want to make bad feelings, but there are more questions then answers I think...

Hello wonderer,

The list of items you present does in fact raise a number of questions, most of which will be answered once NASLite-2 is released. We have made a number of scattered posts on the forum regarding NASLite-2 updates and features.

Couple of things that seem to be missing from your comparison are ease-of-use and stability.

People of various skill levels have successfully deployed NASLite. That includes folks that have very little experience, which is hardly the case with other similar products. NASLite is not designed to be everything to everyone. RedHat and SuSE do a wonderful job at that, so if one is strictly interested in features, all of those can be found in most full distributions.

Stability on the other hand is important regardless of one’s skill level. We built NASLite to be as stable as possible. It is our goal to build a NAS OS that tolerates hardware deficiencies, compensates for user ignorance or incompetence, and most importantly, keeps the data folks commit to it as safe and sound as possible.

Combining ease-of-use, stability and speed in a capable NAS OS of a tiny footprint is a challenge we have set to meet and met. For the time being, that is something we consider to be unique to NASLite. We plan to do even better with NASLite-2.



It would be inappropriate for me to comment on FreeNAS, however one can derive one’s own opinion at the very active FreeNAS forum:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=507590

FreeNAS is free indeed…

I would also like to add, v2 will address nearly all of the new features people have asked for, and new some new ones.

I also would like to stress the goals of NASLite, "Ease of Use, Stability, and Speed" Adding features like software raid, LDAP, MS Domains etc all come at the expense of one or more of those.


I think in all fairness, FreeNAS should be compared to Openfiler. They appear to both have basically the same feature set and goals.

Your product very much reminds me of the older Network appliance boxes as far as speed. It will be nice to have the hardware RAID support as well as a journaled file system option. I think that most machines now days are more than fast enough to handle the added load of the journaling. My present server is a 400Mhz Celeron, big time overkill for the job. Add in soft RAID and it will be just about right. Permisions might also be nice in a 2.0+ version. None of these features should cause the platform to be unstable or deliver poor performance from a basic platform like a celeron 400 or faster. I notice no difference between my old P200MMX and the present Celeron with my Gigabit card in either.

We all await the release of the 2.0 product line. It might also be nice and even benefical to toot your horn a bit at this stage. I for one REALLY want to see software RAID5 or RAID hardware supported. That is tops on my wish list of added features. Dump the floppy and let us use a CDROM or USB key.

Keep up the good work,

Mike