FreeNAS - putting that old hardware to work
FreeNAS - Putting that old hardware to work
It seems that every technology junkie has a stash of old hardware and devices. What to do with these old systems seem to be the ever popular question. There is a direct proportion between the usefulness of hardware and it's age. The older that hardware the less flexible your options until you end up recycling or upcycling it (hopefully you are not tossing your old hardware in the dump)
Well this junkie is no different - In going through some I have had sitting in a corner for a few years I found a couple of old desktops systems. One of these was my a circa 2005 Windows XP machine.
Sweet - Now what to do with it? I can run um..well .... XP? Linux? But really what can I do with it? Then, as another disk full notification from Time Machine displays on the screen, the beginnings of a cunning plan start to form -- this system is perfect for a home NAS device.
I know - I can purchase an off-the-shelf NAS device in a slick form factor for just a couple of hundred US dollars. However these commodity NAS devices commonly hold two hard drives, four if you are lucky. Which, since you want to protect the integrity of the data you store, you will likely mirror, reducing your overall storage capacity (see this for information on RAID levels). You have not really solved the problem, rather just kicked the can down the road, while adding to that ever growing stash of old hardware.
Overview
For this project, I decided to utilize FreeNAS. FreeNAS is an incredibly robust solution, that as the name suggests is available for free.
FreeNAS is a great solution in general, as it can be easily placed in to environments of all sizes. It is simple enough for a home user to implement and robust enough for even the most rigorous of enterprise teams. FreeNAS provides simultaneous support for the native Windows, Linux and Mac file shares - Including serving as an Network Time Machine for your Mac.
This means that using FreeNAS you can create easily deploy an in-home cloud storage solution to stash that good stuff you collect along the way or deploy it in to a corporate environment backing up data from all of your systems.
FreeNAS sports integration with VMware allowing for the coordination of a snapshot of your running VMs and the backup of your VMware server. In addition, to snapshots of your virtual machines, you can configure FreeNAS to periodically take snapshots of its own data sets - which can be handy if you need to roll your entire digital life back in time to find thing you had way back when, or just brag that you have a time machine for your Time Machine.
Implementation
Well...that story is yet to come....stay tuned
::TheJunkie::
Dosage Information
FreeNAS
v9.3
It seems that every technology junkie has a stash of old hardware and devices. What to do with these old systems seem to be the ever popular question. There is a direct proportion between the usefulness of hardware and it's age. The older that hardware the less flexible your options until you end up recycling or upcycling it (hopefully you are not tossing your old hardware in the dump)
Well this junkie is no different - In going through some I have had sitting in a corner for a few years I found a couple of old desktops systems. One of these was my a circa 2005 Windows XP machine.
Sweet - Now what to do with it? I can run um..well .... XP? Linux? But really what can I do with it? Then, as another disk full notification from Time Machine displays on the screen, the beginnings of a cunning plan start to form -- this system is perfect for a home NAS device.
I know - I can purchase an off-the-shelf NAS device in a slick form factor for just a couple of hundred US dollars. However these commodity NAS devices commonly hold two hard drives, four if you are lucky. Which, since you want to protect the integrity of the data you store, you will likely mirror, reducing your overall storage capacity (see this for information on RAID levels). You have not really solved the problem, rather just kicked the can down the road, while adding to that ever growing stash of old hardware.
Overview
For this project, I decided to utilize FreeNAS. FreeNAS is an incredibly robust solution, that as the name suggests is available for free.
FreeNAS is a great solution in general, as it can be easily placed in to environments of all sizes. It is simple enough for a home user to implement and robust enough for even the most rigorous of enterprise teams. FreeNAS provides simultaneous support for the native Windows, Linux and Mac file shares - Including serving as an Network Time Machine for your Mac.
This means that using FreeNAS you can create easily deploy an in-home cloud storage solution to stash that good stuff you collect along the way or deploy it in to a corporate environment backing up data from all of your systems.
FreeNAS sports integration with VMware allowing for the coordination of a snapshot of your running VMs and the backup of your VMware server. In addition, to snapshots of your virtual machines, you can configure FreeNAS to periodically take snapshots of its own data sets - which can be handy if you need to roll your entire digital life back in time to find thing you had way back when, or just brag that you have a time machine for your Time Machine.
Implementation
Well...that story is yet to come....stay tuned
::TheJunkie::
Dosage Information
FreeNAS
v9.3
http://www.freenas.org
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