Linux nas server

Few of us probably give it much thought, but what's in a NAS device, anyway? If you've given it any thought over the last few years, you probably think the answer is little more than a bunch of hard drives and a previous-generation CPU. Not so. When a market starts to heat up—as the NAS market has—developers tend to get creative quickly. The NAS market used to be dominated by small, one-trick file servers built with bare-bones Linux or BSD Unix operating systems. But in this roundup, we witnessed Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with Server Appliance Kit (SAK) beginning to change the market landscape.

It was just a matter of time before Microsoft jumped in to claim a piece of this industry, where Linux is the dominant operating system. By installing Windows 2000 Server with SAK, original manufacturers can develop server appliances such as NAS devices or Web servers without having to build either a proprietary operating system or software that must, in turn, work with widely available standard Windows software. And that helps manufacturers shorten the time to market.

SAK includes a local user interface framework for integrating a small LCD and a keypad into the appliance, as well as a Web interface framework for designing remote-administration tools. With SAK, developers can also embed a Microsoft Terminal Services console in the administration interface via an ActiveX control.

From the end user's perspective, NAS products built on Windows 2000 Server with SAK offer both advantages and disadvantages compared with Linux-based systems. A comparison among development approaches illustrates diverging philosophies in designing NAS technology.

Though Linux boxes are every bit as configurable when you drill into their management utilities as their SAK-based counterparts, developers tend to prioritize on simplicity and an appliance-like plug-and-play feel, especially when it comes to a product's function and user interface. With Linux models, the lean and fast OS resides in flash memory or partitioned on a single drive, out of reach of the end user. If simplicity and security are seen as key factors, then this approach leaves little in the way of exposed settings and configuration options and makes it much more difficult to disable or break the device.

The strengths of Windows 2000 Server with SAK are that it is scalable and that, essentially, it is a full-fledged operating system. SAK hides a system's complexity with a simple appliance-like interface. Underneath is a full-featured version of Windows 2000 Server. Because of this, a SAK-based NAS device is instantly scalable. Using Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS), multiple Windows-powered storage appliances can be bound into one logical hard drive.

Also, a SAK-based NAS device can be adapted to perform tasks other than file serving, as long as those tasks do not overburden the CPU. For example, it wouldn't be out of the question to run a small, server-side program on a NAS device to support a client-server application. And if your organization is already a Windows shop, you can use a NAS device to support many existing client-server applications without much modification. The cost of having such extendability is that the system is vulnerable to user configuration mistakes.

All these factors together indicate that a race is afoot among the manufacturers to determine whether these two subspecies of NAS can coexist or whether one will dominate. So if you are planning to purchase NAS equipment, factor in the rest of your architecture and application needs to determine which approach is the best fit for you.

Copyright ?? 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.