best storage only os/protocol

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stretch

New Member
Nov 13, 2018
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I'm looking to build a storage only server that will connect to a secondary server via ethernet which will serve the content. What os would people recommend for the storage server? i use OMV for nas but think that's a bit bloated for what I need. Something that supports software raid would be best as i've had some bad experiences with hardware raid cards.

Also what would the best protocol to use to connect the storage server to the main one? nfs, webdav, sshfs etc?
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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That totally depends on what kind of data you want to serve and your speed/safety/compression/deduplication etc requirements.
Any modern OS can do that, even windows... (if you server another windows box for example)
 

stretch

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Nov 13, 2018
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I favour and confident with debian, I was looking for an out of the box linux nas distro that would provide simple file sharing. This will be used as back end storage with another debian server sitting in front of it and connected together via ethernet.
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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well why not a basic debian box then with nfs server? most simple solution if you don't have any additional requirements?
O/c you still can play with underlying filesystems if you want to?
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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If I understand correctly, you have a server that provides services and now you want a second one for backup or failover?

I would try to use ZFS on both systems. This would give the best possible datasecurity, Ransomware secure versioning with read only snaps and ZFS replication. This is a high performance method to keep two servers in sync even with open files, even on a high load Petabyte system down to a minute delay between. No other sync solution can offer this.

The best ZFS OS is Oracle Solaris Unix (where ZFS comes from) with genuine ZFS v44. Next best are the free Solaris forks with Open-ZFS. All of them are full featured server OSs with services like NFS, SMB, iSCSI, network virtualisation as genuine Solarish services (no third party software like SAMBA or others) needed. ZFS is the only supported filesystem on Solarish with best of all ZFS integration.

Next best are solutions based on Free-BSD Unix where Open-ZFS is implemented for a long time with similar services like on Linux but a strong focus on ZFS.

Open-ZFS is also available on Linux but lacks the integration quality of Solarish or Free-BSD. If your main system is Linux you would need to check if you can use ZFS and ZFS replication. The replication should be possible between all Open-ZFS platforms (not with genuine Solaris ZFS)