Darma today announced its network attached storage (NAS) operating system for OEMs who manufacturer NAS servers, NAS-SAN gateways, and disk-based backup appliances.
Darma Announces Network Storage Operating System
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In case if anyone want to see the screenshots, check -> http://www.nas.darma.com/products/demo/demo_gui.html
i can’t believe they’re using Java for the GUI
who cares? how long are you gonna look at the setup screen anyway. as long as i can get my files using whatever OS i happen to have lying around im happy.
on Linux. Nice to see a fully integrated solution.
The system is designed to support Windows, Unix, & Mac OS clients… The java part is the client configuration utility. If you didn’t write the configuration utility in java, then you’d have to write 3 utilities!
The only other option would be to install Apache on the system and create a web based configuration system. But this would increase the system overhead and affect disk preformance; and the entire idea behind the system is disk.
Looking at the feature spec, it _seems_ this might be based
on the Linux kernel. Can someone confirm that ?
And if so, do they follow the GPL ?
It will be interesting to see how they worked the Point In Time snapshots without modifying either the kernel or the XFS file system. If they’re using the Linux kernel, they’re obligated to feed those changes back into the community. If they’re using the XFS file system, AND they’re using the GPL version (vs licensing a different tree from SGI), then those changes as well are obligated back to the community.
I don’t believe the OSS community has an FS capable of Point In Time snapshots at the moment, and this will be a nice addition.
They can probably do it by modifying only the file system, and they could have licensed that directly from SGI so we may never see this.
Not being a file system hacker, anyone have an opinion as to which file system would be the easiest to add this kind of capability to?
How would you go about doing it? Do you think it is a fair requirement to require unmounting the file system before recovering from a snapshot? It’s OK to have it mounted to create the snapshot, but what about recovery? What about snapshotting the boot/root volume? That might be a bit scary.
including the GPL. And, while they talk about Open standards and open source utils, there’s no mention of source code availability.
These guys may be toying with violating the GPL is they don’t provide at least some of the source.
MacOS X runs on a variation of FreeBSD, but you don’t see them giving out source code. Their modifications to FreeBSD are out there as Darwin. MacOS X itself is closed source.
Well, Darwin is opensource ( I believe). So, the modifications that are being made to the FreeBSD-derived stuff are being returned to the community.
Let’s not forget that FreeBSD is NOT GPL’ed. I’m thrilled to see projects using Linux but respecting the GPL goes hand-in-hand with using the kernel code and GNU utils.