Rockstor is a free and open source NAS (Network Attached Storage) operating system. It's a software solution and can be installed on commodity hardware or a hypervisor satisfying :ref:`minsysreqs`
For quick evaluation, install Rockstor on Virtual Box, Virtual Machine Manager or VMWare. See :ref:`quickeval` for more information.
Installation of Rockstor is a very easy and short process. See :ref:`quickstartguide` to get started.
Rockstor runs on 64-bit commodity hardware. You can install it on bare metal or a hypervisor. See :ref:`quickstartguide` for more information.
Yes. Rockstor is optimized to do less writes if it detects the root drive to be USB flash drive or SSD. As expected, USB 2.0 can be pretty slow. So we recommend a USB 3.0 drive even if your motherboard doesn't support USB 3.0 as it'll still be faster. You can also purchase a 16 GB USB 3.0 drive from our shop and support our effort!
Yes. If your motherboard has a spare PCI-Express slot you can get an SSD boot drive from our shop. This is a cheap yet much faster alternative to a USB flash drive. Here's a short blog post with more information.
Little to nothing, depending on how you choose to receive software updates. You can download and install Rockstor from the ISO file free of cost. However, we release rolling updates. These updates are divided into a Stable channel and a Testing channel. Testing channel is free, but access to Stable channel requires a small subscription fee. See :ref:`update_channels` for more information.
Rockstor supports popular file sharing protocols like Samba/CIFS, NFS, SFTP and AFP. Linux, Apple and Windows clients can easily share files using Rockstor. Rockstor also supports apps like OwnCloud, Syncthing and others in the form of :ref:`rockons_intro` that provide more advanced and easier ways to share and access your files.
For home or small business use, we've seen Rockstor install flawlessly on HP, DELL and Supermicro servers and desktops. The developers of Rockstor use HP Micro servers for individual use.
Rockstor also installs smoothly on the latest generation of servers from vendors like HP and Supermicro.
Rockstor should be updated directly from the web-ui when it indicates that an update is available. It's a simple, non-disruptive process and takes only a couple of mouse clicks and a few minutes.
Rockstor development happens at a reasonably fast pace. We create test releases almost every other day. Once we are satisfied with a batch of changes, we release a stable update. This happens roughly once or twice a month.
While we make major releases that require complete OS install, we try to make these releases as infrequent as possible. However, we constantly improve Rockstor and push tested updates in small batches which can be updated online right from the web-ui. We do this because we want our users to get the best of Rockstor without any unnecessary disruption or delay.
Rockstor is free software licenced under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2. See here for more details.
Rockstor 3.x is based on CentOS 7. We rebrand CentOS, add Rockstor software in the form of additional rpms and change the installer to make it a bit more straight forward and specific.
BTRFS all the way! Though there's a lot more to Rockstor than the filesystem, at the core Rockstor productizes neat features of the BTRFS.
This is a very important question and a lot of our work with Rockstor revolves around minimizing data loss. There are a few measures you can take to prevent dataloss and have disaster recovery strategy for different possibilities. See :ref:`dataloss`. Also note that the btrfs raid5/6 profiles are not currently recommended for production use.
Not currently. But since Rockstor is open source, anyone in our community can work with us to get new features added in the future.
Yes. Rockstor has a built-in engine that supports Docker based applications. See :ref:`rockons_intro`.
For the current list see :ref:`rockons_available`. Note that new ones are added regularly and can be requested on the Forum.
Please see our :ref:`afp` section which details how to set this up using Rockstor's build in :ref:`time_machine` compatible afp settings. Also of interest is the following more dated blog entry Time Machine backups with Rockstor.
Rockstor is hardware agnostic, so you can build a complete Linux, BTRFS powered NAS solution using the Rockstor NAS OS and hardware of your choice. If you are a home-user/prosumer, read 8TB DIY NAS using Rockstor. For a bigger storage footprint, read 240TB DIY NAS using Rockstor . The only requirement is that the system be of a 64bit Intel or compatible architecture.
With Rockstor, you can scale your infrastructure with low incremental cost to support your growing data needs. You can have very large storage capacity, limited only by system resources like CPU, RAM etc. Feel free to contact us with your questions.
Yes. Rockstor can be installed on many small computeres like ASUS VivoPC or Intel NUC. Here's a blog post describing Rockstor on Intel NUC.
You can contact us with your requirements and we will get in touch with you. We do storage services and support and are happy to enable you to use Rockstor for your storage requirements.
BTRFS is a newer Linux filesystem and is under heavy development. Some commercial Linux distribution vendors are supporting it to various levels and others will follow very soon given that the stability has improved quite a bit. So for now, you have to answer that question yourself based on data and your risk. In our experience, BTRFS has become very reliable. Also, Rockstor confines users from using BTRFS more freely, thus reducing the chances of hitting deep intricate bugs. The fact that BTRFS bugs being reported lately are only triggered by very special scenarios is an encouraging sign.
However a proviso here is that The BTRFS community consensus is that raid5 and raid6 levels of btrfs support are not yet fully stable and so are *not recommended for production use*. Please see the btrfs wiki for up to date information on all btrfs matters.
BTRFS is in it's own league among Linux filesystems and we see tremendous value in building over it and making it's advanced feature set easily accessible to users. While there are other excellent filesystems, we plan to focus on providing the best solution based on BTRFS.
We recommend you join our community forum, follow the rockstor-core project on github, and follow us on twitter.
Thanks for asking and welcome to the Rockstor community. Depending on your needs and interests, there are a few ways to participate. See :ref:`contributetorockstor` for more details. Don't feel shy and e-mail any of the developers if you like to discuss more before jumping in!
You can create issues or add comments to existing ones on our github issue tracker. The forum is also a good place to start.