Showing posts from software category

How do self-encrypting drives fit into an open source storage server? Well, before we dive into the premise of this blog, for those of you not familiar with SED drives, here’s a quick overview: Wha

Ransomware. It’s a word we’re being inundated with everywhere we turn. And rightfully so. Over the last few years, it has become more and more prevalent. And definitely a bigger concern for IT departments. Every week, it seems like we read another

From customers to social channels, we’ve listened to your feedback to improve our server administration software, Houston. Today, we’re excited to share our new Houston updates and feat

Let’s talk about a perfect pair — Proxmox and Houston UI. You’ve most likely heard us talk about Proxmox before, especially recently — now that we officially offer and support Proxmox on our 45Drives servers. We’ve been using Proxmox as our open s

Virtualization is an exciting technology that offers many potential benefits to a massive range of applications. Virtualization as a concept is ancient – it has been around for years, and its current position in the storage world is well establish

Virtualization adds an abstraction layer between physical hardware and the systems and programs interacting with it. Having a virtual layer between your software and hardware provides huge benefits to many applications and potential future-proofin

You may have heard that Redhat is ending CentOS as the downstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) rebuild and repositioning it as an upstream build of RHEL. At 45Drives, we had a choice to make – what would be our new primary operating system (OS)

How great would it be to have a simple way to manage and maintain your storage infrastructure? Good news, our engineers have been working on making that happen and we

* Shortly after we released this blog Red Hat made the decision to kill off CentOS 8. Check out this video where we explain more about this topic. If you follow 45Drives, you’ve probably heard us m

The storage landscape If you are looking to store a lot of data, basically there are two options. The Cloud is out. As anyone who has seriously considered it can

When most people use S3 (Simple Storage Service), the first thing they think about is Amazon Cloud Storage. However, the S3 protocol is actually used in many places outside of AWS. S3 is used for i

Mitch is back with another Tuesday Tech Tip! Watch this week’s video to learn the five best practices you should consider for the administration of your ZFS storage pools. The best part

It’s that day of the week again, Tech Tip Tuesday! In this week’s tech tip, Mitch gives us an overview of the Network File System (NFS) protocol. He explains the background of NFS, why

Each Tuesday, we will be releasing a tech tip video that will give users information on various topics relating to our Storinator storage servers. This week, Mitch gives you a comparison of Linux v

This week, Mitch gives you an overview of what Ceph is at its core, including a look at the components that are needed to make up a Ceph storage cluster. Be sure to check out our GitHub: https

Each Tuesday, we will be releasing a tech tip video that will give users information on various topics relating to our Storinator storage servers. This week, we tackle a commonly asked question her

In this week’s tech tip, Mitch walks us through the process of patching your IPMI and offers a few tips and tricks to secure your motherboard for any future issues that may occur. Check it out below and let us know what you think! Each Tuesd

In this week’s tech tip, we’re debunking the ZFS 80% rule! Today lead engineer Brett Kelly is talking about ZFS writes and the “mystical” 80 percent rule.  Check it out below. Don’t forget, each Tuesday, we relea

Curious how you expand a Ceph Cluster? We can help! In today’s’ tech tip, lead engineer Brett Kelly explains everything you need to know when planning to expand your cluster. Don’

In today’s weekly tech tip, Mitch discusses the advantages and disadvantages of CentOS and FreeNAS! Check it out below and be sure to watch the ending and help us with our office debate. Don’t forget, each Tuesday, we release a quick t

Some of you may have seen the recent stories about security flaws found within the Baseboard Management controllers (BMC) within SuperMicro Motherboards. While this is indeed very serious

We’re back with another Tech Tip and this week we’re answering a question from one of our users. In this tech tip video, our Lead Engineer Brett Kelly goes more in-depth to answer a que

This week Mitch is telling us all about ZFS Snapshots in under 5 minutes! Did you know ZFS Snapshots can be mounted read-only to allow for the recovery of files or to roll-back an entire file system to the last time a snapshot was created? If

We use the term Ceph a lot, but have you ever wondered what it actually stands for? Our lead engineer Brett Kelly, gives a great explanation in this week’s tech tip! He also talks about CephFS and why he thinks it’s the best-distr

How do you choose the right RAID configuration? Our 45Drives engineers are here to help answer that question! Check out this week’s Tuesday Tech Tip to find out the 5 main aspects to con

Did you know your Storinator has the power to be both, a local storage target and a high-performance server that can manage your video recording software?  Even if you may already have an exis

Each Tuesday, we release a quick tech tip video that helps give our users information on various topics relating to our Storinator storage servers.This week, Mitch is showing you the various ways t

Curious about Ansible? Our lead engineer Brett Kelly, is telling us all about it in this week’s Tech Tip! to find out why we love using this automation tool here at 45Drives and how to u

This week on our weekly video tech tips series we are talking about network bonding on CentOS and why it’s useful. Check it out below to learn more. Hey guys, Mitch here with 45Drives, welcome back to our weekly tech tip video. Today I’

We’re back this week with another tech tip! Did you know you can back your Storinator up to the cloud? Chris tells us all we need to know in this weeks 45Drives tech tip. Having a d

Each week we release a 45Drives Tech Tip from one of our team members. These short tech tips videos cover some of the most frequently asked questions we receive from storage users, customers. fans and followers.   We cover topics such as

Some people are under the impression – if it’s free, it can’t be enterprise. We’re here to tell you that’s not correct. Although Ceph is free, it carries some amazing features that valida

How to Protect Your Data Using ZFS A question often asked in the server industry is, ‘what’s better – software RAID or hardware RAID?’ If you research this topic, a lot of the information about RAID suggests that a hardware RAID card is pref

In this blog and the series of blogs to follow I will focus solely on Ceph Clustering. Many people are intimidated by Ceph because they find it complex – but when you understand it, that’s not the

We build some pretty awesome storage servers or at least that’s what our customers and fans say about us! We like to think it’s because our Storinators solve their storage issues by holding huge am

All of our Storinator Massive Storage Servers, as well as many other computers, have a remote management interface called Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). In this blog, I’m go

How to build a Petabyte cluster using GlusterFS with ZFS running on Storinator massive storage servers  If you checked out our recent video on clustering, you may have seen me keep a high-speed file transfer going, while I did just about

At 45 Drives, we make really large capacity storage servers. When we first started out, our machines were relatively slow, and focused on cold-to-lukewarm storage applications; but our users p

At 45 Drives, the FreeNAS network attached storage operating system is a popular choice to run our high performance massive storage pods. It combines the advantages of the modern ZFS copy on write

Thomas Kay founded Tom’s Computer Support in 2001 with the goal of providing the type of professional IT support larger companies enjoy to small businesses in P

A common question we get asked here at 45 Drives is, “What RAID should I use with my Storinator?” Our answer: “What are you trying to do?” Choosing which RAID level is right for your applicati

As a NAS operating system, FreeNAS has been out there for a decade. Working on the beautiful marriage of FreeBSD and ZFS, it’s been tried and tested by many users within the storage community, to great success. But if you’re one of tho

My last post, How to Achieve 20 Gb & 30 Gb Bandwidth through Network Bonding, was our most popular blog entry yet. There was a LOT of discussion and comments about the results of my testin

We’re adding another new voice to the blog – Rob MacQueen is an engineer in our R&D department. In his first blog post, he shares his experiments with setting up network bonding in order to ach

Introducing a new voice to the 45 Drives blog, Darrell Cormier. Darrell is part of our R&D team! At 45 Drives, we’re continuously striving to improve the quality of our systems. Our goal

In Part 1 of the series, I discussed the Power Draw of a Storinator on Startup and other conditions. Results showed that our Storinator’s Power Supply Unit (PSU) is well suited for the task at

There is a lot going on inside your Storinator. CPUs are a cyclin’, fans are turnin’, data is movin’, and most importantly, 45 drives are spinnin’! A steady and reliable power source is essential to make all of this ha

Introducing a new voice to the 45 Drives blog – Brett Kelly, one of the R&D engineers for 45 Drives, who shares his experience with upgrading to CentOS 7.  45 Drives is built on the idea o