[OpenIndiana-discuss] Illumos as a NAS

[finid at linuxbsdos.com]

My response is not necessarily specific to this thread, but has any 
body looked at what OmniOs guys are doing, and see if there is a 
possibility of pooling resources. Merge efforts, so that there are more 
resources to direct at what we are trying to do. Of course, it means 
that some people will have to compromise on certain issues, but for the 
good of the community, these things have to be done.

Right now, PC-BSD and FreeBSD are just about the only real, free means 
of playing with ZFS, but not in a very user-friendly manner.

The market (free and commercial) for what ZFS brings to the table is 
too big to be ignored.

http://omnios.omniti.com/

Just my 2 cents!


--
finid



On 2012-09-04 14:59, James Relph wrote:
>> AD issues are going to require someone tenacious, motivated, and a 
>> bit
>> masochistic as it's historically been a bit of a moving target.
>
> AD seems reasonably stable these days, and in fact the current
> Illumos strategy works 90% of the way, it's the idmap that actually
> breaks down because of the approach taken with ephemeral UIDs.  It's
> the only system that I've seen use that approach, and it just seems
> almost guaranteed to make it difficult for apps that don't have the
> special hooks that the CIFS server uses.  The opendirectoryd (Mac OS
> X) and winbind approaches seems much more reliable - map a user to a
> generated UID which will be the same across the domain.  Then apps
> don't need to worry about local or AD users, they just
>
>> Low hanging fruit is to ignore the AD integration for now, make this 
>> a good
>> NAS for home users without the AD integration issues resolved. 
>> Example of a
>> common use case: iTunes media library. 2+ TB of music, movies, 
>> books,
>> podcasts, etc. becomes more than a bit unwieldy to handle natively 
>> on a
>> Mac, but Illumos is well suited to handle this workload. No AD 
>> integration
>> is necessary for this use case. Local system auth is "good enough".
>
> The home market is definitely interesting, but from our point of
> view, Apple have basically stopped selling all but basic server
> systems, and we're seeing a lot of small/medium businesses (10-50
> users) and at the other end of the scale enterprise users (1000+
> users) who are looking to replace Xserves.  OI with ZFS and netatalk 
> 3
> is *awesome* for that (seriously, customers used to Xserves using 
> HFS+
> with no snapshotting, native compression, scrubbing etc. see ZFS as
> almost magical).  The problem is that a lot of these companies have 
> an
> AD of one form of another (SBS or full blown multi-site forests).
> We're just viewing this from the perspective of a Mac consultancy, 
> and
> we're really seeing lots of opportunities that involve AD 
> integration,
> if you add in the number of full Windows businesses it's a massive
> potential market.
>
> The other thing is - because we've got a commercial opportunity here
> we're willing to support that kind of development financially - and
> I've offered bounties (and asked if anyone knows any developers
> looking for contract work) on this exact problem - and we'd be 
> willing
> to talk pretty decent amounts - we are seeing a lot of interest in 
> ZFS
> based systems!  I think that's the main benefit of looking at
> commercial opportunities like AD integration because you can get
> businesses willing to fund developments that benefit the entire
> community (and Linux in particular has benefitted massively from the
> support of companies like IBM and RedHat).
>
> James.
>
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