Files are at the heart of every company, large or small. Whether your network spans continents or a few cubicles, your files become the foundation of your business. No one can afford unreliable file service, especially when the files you manage are continually growing and requiring more and more storage space.
Businesses today demand more storage space and faster and easier access to data. To meet the demands, you need a file system that can scale to a growing business, is easily maintained, and is better protected against corruption. NSS provides a variety of features that can be combined to provide a robust and reliable solution for your business.
NSS provides the following benefits on Linux and NetWare:
A journaling file system that lets you create bigger volumes that activate (mount) quicker, store more data, and resist corruption better than non-journaling file systems.
Encrypted volume support to meet the legal standard of making data inaccessible to software that circumvents normal access control, such as if the media were stolen.
Access control and visibility management using the Novell trustee model.
An unlimited number of NSS volumes, with up to 255 mounted concurrently.
Lower memory requirements: 1 MB of RAM can activate an NSS volume.
Pools of storage that span multiple devices and support dynamic resizing to grow the pool and volumes.
Pool snapshots that capture point-in-time versions of files in the pool.
Software RAID support, including RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring), and RAID 5 (striping). NetWare tools also support creating RAID 10 (mirroring RAID 0 devices), and RAID 15 (mirroring RAID 5 devices).
Multiple server activation prevention (MSAP) to help protect pools from being concurrently activated by multiple servers that do not share a cluster relationship.
Up to 4 billion (10E9) files in a single directory, so how you organize files is limited only by the application or file browser, not the file system.
Faster access to data, regardless of file size or volume size.
Directory space restrictions.
User space restrictions.
Salvage support for deleted volumes and files.
Data compression.
Novell Distributed File Services allows you to better manage storage growth by defining virtual file structures with junctions, moving volumes, and splitting volumes. For information, see the NW 6.5 SP8: Novell Distributed File Services Administration Guide.
Novell Archive and Version Services allows you to archive interval-based versions of user files on NSS volumes, and to make them available to users for individual retrieval. For information, see the following:
NSS provides the following additional benefits for NetWare:
Multiple I/O path support for devices.
Removable media (CD, DVD, USB drives, and so on) and image files activated as NSS volumes.
Transaction Tracking System™ (TTS™) for tracking file content changes to user data and ensuring that the transactions are completed.