American Megatrends's NAS based on custom FreeBSD

Asmodai writes "American Megatrends unveiled its StorTrends NAS software with NDMP support. This piece of software, which plugs into the StorTrends and ServTrends storage solutions, is a custom developed FreeBSD. Looks interesting for those who are interested in NAS and SAN and the subsequent managing and monitoring." It's interesting that this press release (because that's what it is) mentions FreeBSD by name.

Comments

Re:BSD on Flash, they just moved media to memory?

[unclei]

So this is just BSD on a flash rom? Or is this all integrated into the Bios, so you just power the machine on and configure?

Yes and no. The machine powers on and the OS loads from an IDE flash rom. The system has a default IP and you configure everything through a web browser. The flash is 32MB.

I could do the same thing with a cdrom, burn everything onto CDROM, boot cdrom, and not touch the harddrives.

You could, but you'd have to have a CDROM drive in the thing, which takes up valuable space in a 1U or even 3U rackmount server. Also, flash roms have no moving parts, which means one less thing to fail on a machine that needs to run 24/7/365. Also, the flash image can be updated automatically, without opening the box, via FTP. And of course, if you made it yourself, you'd be missing all of the custom hardware in there that does health/disk monitoring/alerting, etc, etc.

Short version: This is a lot more than justFreeBSD on a flashrom.