The Benefits of NSS

The following sections describe the benefits that Novell Storage Services (NSS) offers.

Novell Storage Services offers you many advantages, such as

The ability to store larger files (up to 8 terabytes). NSS can recognize and utilize much more data on large devices than other file systems.
The ability to store large numbers of files on an NSS volume (up to 8 trillion). This feature cuts down on directory level management time.
The ability to have up to 1,000,000 files open simultaneously.
Rapid access to data regardless of file size. Any size file can be opened in the same amount of time.
The ability to mount many more NSS volumes on a server---up to 255 depending on the NetWare Loadable Module^TM and any physical limitations.
NSS volumes that mount and verify themselves rapidly. Any size volume can be recovered and mounted in under a minute if cleanly dismounted.
Full CD-ROM support for ISO9660 and Macintosh* HFS formats which includes automatic mounting using CDROM.NLM. The new CDROM.NLM along with NSS makes it much faster and easier to mount your CD-ROM.
DOS FAT partitions that can be made available dynamically as NSS volumes.
The ability to mount NSS volumes with only 1 MB available RAM.
Faster error recovery. NSS volume errors are noted quickly.
The ability to define new name spaces (in addition to DOS, Macintosh, LONG, and UNIX/NFS).
The ability to define new media formats through the Loadable Storage Subsystem (LSS) interface. Future formats could include UDF for use with Digital Video Discs (DVD) and many others.
The ability to manage and enable a variety of storage devices from one location by using NSS volumes. For this release, only hard drives and CD-ROM devices are supported. In the near future, other devices will be supported.
The ability to store a large object or large numbers of objects without degrading system performance. No matter how large a volume, directory, or file is, NSS still performs well.

Improved System Performance with NSS

NSS provides enhanced system performance by providing the following benefits.

Quick NSS Volume Mounts

Time previously spent waiting for a NetWare volume to mount can now become productive work time. Recovering and mounting an NSS volume takes minutes to complete in most cases. Corruption problems may be transparent.

NSS reduces data recovery time after a file system crash. Instead of scanning an entire volume for corruptions, NSS quickly replays the latest set of changes to make sure they are written correctly, and brings the NSS volume back online shortly. Applications such as mail services really benefit from NSS because of minimal server down time.

Improved Resource Use

NSS solves memory management problems by running on any amount of memory available on your server. This means NSS can mount any size NSS volume with as little as 1 MB of memory and with a small footprint size of 2 MB.

NSS allows systems with limited resources to perform better. Larger systems provide the best performance, however, because of the efficient design of the NSS object engine.

Sophisticated data management techniques allow NSS to make efficient use of available disk space. For example, in the traditional NetWare file system, individual name space storage is used for each name space in an object's name. In NSS, multiple name spaces share the same storage space.

NSS also has the ability to store large objects in balanced trees, called B-tree, for faster storage access.

Increased Volume, Directory, and File Support

NSS uses 64-bit interfaces in the storage engine and advanced algorithms to manage the storage system. That way you can easily store a single file as large as 8 Terabytes or create very large numbers of directory and file entries. NSS supports unlimited numbers of NSS volumes, but only 255 of them may be simultaneously mounted in the traditional NetWare file system and seen using traditional clients.

The traditional NetWare file system can support up to 16 million directory entries. But each name space requires an entry on the volume for each file. So if you have four name spaces, your traditional NetWare file system maximum is 4 million files.

The number of files supported by the traditional NetWare file system may seem large, but if you are creating hundreds of thousands of files a day, the current limit could be reached rapidly. Because NSS can hold up to 8 trillion files in an NSS volume, NSS is ideal for storage and file management in large enterprise companies, such as banks, credit card companies, or government agencies that require unlimited entries.

Better Investment Return

NSS costs no more than the traditional NetWare file system because it is included in NetWare 5. No new hardware or additional memory is required, and time to administer the system is cut drastically. The modular structure of NSS allows you to add functionality as new technology is introduced or your business needs change. Software upgrades often require more RAM, but no additional RAM is necessary with NSS.