OpenSolaris NAS with ZFS

I read Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. I don’t know why. I am interested in what he has to say, despite the fact that his blog seems to be more PR than substance some times. Maybe I do it also because I admire Sun’s openness, want to support it and wish other companies would do the same. Anyway, today I was reading this post and was inspired.  Basically it’s an internal memo about restructuring and blah blah, but there was one part about Sun placing the NAS group within their systems division and a blurb about ZFS. I had a single picture in my head, a NAS running OpenSolaris with ZFS. I’ve been reading up on ZFS for a while, but never had a chance to play it despite having installed Solaris in VMWare a few times. 

I use FreeNAS and love it, but having ZFS on a NAS device might just push me towards using Solaris. There are a few complications, although they may be minor. There’s no Samba by default in OpenSolaris, and I may need to build in some of FreeNAS’s other services, but I’m hoping ZFS will make it worthwhile. The hardest part, I think, would be ease of management. I don’t know if OpenSolaris has something like Linux’s Webmin, or maybe something like VNC would be  quick a dirty way to get GUI management–although managing a NAS in a desktop environment hardly seems like streamlined management.

I’m also encouraged to see that I’m not the only one who has thought of this. A quick Google search brings up a ton of stuff.

Robust NAS appliances will be a hot commodity in the consumer market in the next 5 to ten years as people start relying more on their home networks for their media and need something to store it and back it up.  Windows Home Server shows Microsoft has faith in that market and that it’s not just for geeks with a Linux distro, an old PC< and a whole lot of hard-drives.

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