ApplianceWare is a component-based management architecture which has the java application, ApplianceView, as a component in its feature list. ApplianceView is offered in a demonstration version for ApplianceWare version 5.1. A series of screenshots is provided to take you through some of the features of the OptiNAS product.

ApplianceWare utilizes an auto-discovery mechanism based on multicast. The first demonstrable portion of ApplianceView is the inclusion of an appliance found by the mulitcast as shown below.

ApplianceView uses the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS: http://java.sun.com/products/jaas/) as the security mechanism. By default, an administrator must logon to the appliance using ApplianceView to change the configuration.

After login, if this is the first time the administrator has logged into the system, they are presented with a Setup Wizard.

/p>

The OptiNAS software uses the IBM Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) to present storage components (IDE, SCSI, iSCSI or FC storage) as logical units. In the Status View below for the storage, we can see that 6.8 GB of the total are used as represented in the pie graph of storage capacity.

There are three main areas the administrator typically uses: 1) storage; 2) networking; and 3) security. The storage administration of AV is the presentation of the real devices in conjunction with the logical presentation as seen below.

The overall storage (as shown in the pie chart above) is the top most icon in the logical view on the right-hand side. The multiple device (md) icon below and to the left of the Storage icon represents the RAID-5 set of three disk partitions. The three disk partitions are shown to the left as IDE disks: hda3, hdb3, and hdc3. Using the LVM, we place a Logical Volume Management Group over the RAID 5 set in order to allocate the storage within the set logically.

Thus, below the LVMG1 (which additional JBOD or iSCSI storage can be added to later), a region is cut out of the LVMG or in other words, a portion of the RAID 5 set is isolated logically. By looking at the bar underneath the LVMG icon, you can see that about 15% of its total storage is used as the green bar roughly represents that figure. That region, in turn, can be made into a logical volume and subsequently into CIFS, NFS, or AFP shares, or it could be used as a snapshot as the next screen-shot will show.

By right-clicking (or CTRL-click on MACs) on the LVMG icon, we made another region of only about 2 GB (notice the green bar at the bottom of the LVMG icon has barely registered a change from above). This extra region, however, is the key to making a manual snapshot. It should be noted, that in v5.2 scheduled snapshots with rollbacks is supported.

In order to create a manual snapshot in AV, we right-click on the logical volume(LV) we want to snapshot and are presented with the selection shown below. Alternatively, we could delete the LV or view its properties from the same drop-down menu.

Once "Create Snapshot" is selected, we are given a view of the available (i.e., non-logical volume or non-snapshot regions) regions to select from for the snapshot area. Since we only have a single region available, we choose that one by highlighting it with a mouse click.

Once the snapshot is made by clicking "Accept" above, we see the next view with a snapshot represented by the camera icon.

One of the other major areas an administrator wants to see is the share administration whether using CIFS, NFS, or AFP. Below is a screenshot of the AV share and file administration UI. The lefthand side shows the volumes and the associated shares with a cascading tree appearance. The right hand side shows the list of shares, directories, or files from the selected choice on the left. In this case we see the contents of the "test" share point which coincides with the Region1 and associated LV above in the volume management.

Did you enjoy our demo?
If you have a question or need more information,
Please feel free to contact us.Click here