RockStor 3.8.7
In his never-ending pursuit to find new ways to effectively manage data, Mayank Sharma tests a Linux-based NAS solution.
A Linux-based NAS solution that promises the ultimate storage management you’ve always dreamed of. We think you need to get better dreams.
Despite being based on FreeBSD, the FreeNAS distribution (distro) has been a long-time favourite among Linux users. However, the Debian-based OpenMediaVault distro has started to emerge as a viable alternative for Linux desktop users who don’t want to juggle with the complexities of FreeNAS, and RockStor is another Linux-based NAS server distro that promises to deliver all the features of FreeNAS in an easy to use and manage package.
The best thing about this CentOS 7-based distro is its focus on a single filesystem, Btrfs. This streamlines the process of creating a share and allows the distro to consistently expose the filesystem’s capabilities throughout the interface. The distro supports multiple RAID profiles for data redundancy. You also get the ability to resize a pool by adding or removing disks and even change its RAID profile without losing your data and disrupting access.
When you add disks to a pool, the distro automatically fires up the Btrfs balance process to spread the data evenly across all disks in the pool. To ensure the consistency of the data, the distro also enables you to initiate a Btrfs scrub operation which reads the data on the disks in a pool, verifies their checksums and fixes any corruptions. You can also schedule the scrub operation on the pools.
The individual disks in a pool are Btrfs subvolumes and can be accessed via any of the popular protocols including Samba/CIFS, NFS, AFP and SFTP. You can also easily resize, delete and clone a share.
Rock n Roll
Another interesting feature powered by Btrfs is snapshots which creates an image of a share. However, instead of duplicating all data, the snapshot merely points to the original contents of the share. The snapshot only takes up space when you delete a file from the share which then continues to exist in the snapshot. You can also rollback a share to any of its snapshots.
RockStor’s core functionality can be extended by deploying plugins called Rock-ons. These are implemented as Docker containers and are under active development, but the current version has rock-ons for BTSync, Plex media server, Owncloud, OpenVPN etc.
You can manage the NAS via its web-based administration interface, and the RockStor developers have spent time fine tuning the interface to make it fairly intuitive. We found that the section and screens were laced with helpful tooltips to guide you, while advanced users will appreciate the access control features along with its ability to compress the data using either the zlib or the lzo algorithms. RockStor can also plugin into an Active Directory, NIS or LDAP directory server on the network.
The distro can be tuned to send email alerts for certain activity as long as you give RockStor access to an email account. Once you’ve configured your RockStor NAS, you can use the built-in option to create a backup of the current configuration that can also be used to seed another installation.
The server releases stable updates roughly once or twice a month and you can upgrade your installation from the admin interface with a single click. The impressive list of features are supported by extensive documentation that detail each and every feature. The guides are well illustrated which will help first-time users deploy RockStor without much effort. There’s also an online demo on the project’s website. Go try it.