Storage is one of the core sections of SoftNAS StorageCenter. It has the modules to configure Volumes and LUNs, Storage Pools, CIFS Shares, NFS Exports, Disk Devices, ISCSI LUN Targets, ISCSI LUN Initiators and File System.

Volumes

• Provides a way to allocate storage available in a storage pool and share it over the network. The Volumes and LUNs section of SoftNAS allows you to create, edit, remove and manage storage volumes and their snapshots. For more information, refer to Managing Volumes and LUNs.

Storage Pools

• The storage pools are used to aggregate disk storage into a large pool of storage that can be conveniently allocated and shared by volumes. The Storage Pools tab is where you view and manage all the storage pools.  For more information, refer to Working with Storage Pools.

Common Internet File System (CIFS)

• The Common Internet File System (CIFS) is the standard way that computer users share files across corporate intranets and the Internet. It provides users with seamless file and print interoperability between VMs and Windows-based clients. CIFS allows multiple clients to access and update the same file while preventing conflicts by providing file sharing and file locking. For more information, refer to Configuring CIFS Shares.

NFS Share

• You can configure the volume for sharing as NFS Share so that storage is available for use by the applications, servers and clients on the network. For more information, refer to Managing NFS Exports.

Disk Devices

• Disk Devices provide the underlying storage for SoftNAS and Storage Pools. Disk devices are attached to SoftNAS at the virtualization platform layer, often as virtual hard disks (e.g., VMDK in VMware, EBS volumes in EC2). For more information, refer to Working with Disk Devices.

iSCSI

• Sharing block devices via iSCSI is a common way to make network-attached storage available. An iSCSI LUN is a logical unit of storage. In SoftNAS, the basic storage LUN is a volume that is accessed as a block device. The block device volumes have a mount point in the Linux /dev/zvol filesystem because they are disk block devices. For more information, refer to Configuring iSCSI LUN Targets.

iSCSI SAN Initiators

• The iSCSI SAN Initiators module helps to configure various initiator components such as Authentication Options, iSCSI Timeouts, iSCSI Options, iSCSI Interfaces and iSCSI Connections. For more information, refer to Configuring iSCSI SAN Initiators.