Novell® Storage Services™ is available with NetWare® 5.0 and later. The NSS kernel has been open sourced and is included in Novell SUSE® SLES 9 SP1 Linux distribution and later and with Novell OES 2. The tools to manage NSS are available only in OES.
The NSS file system is unique in many ways, mostly in its ability to simultaneously manage and support shared file services from different file access protocols. It is designed to manage access control in enterprise file sharing environments.
One of its key features is the Novell Access Control Model, which securely scales to hundreds of thousands of users accessing the same storage. NSS and its predecessor (NWFS) are the only file systems that can restrict the visibility of the directory tree based on the user accessing the file system. Both NSS and NWFS have built-in ACL rights inheritance.
NSS includes mature and robust features tailored for the file sharing environment of the largest enterprises.
Dynamic Storage Technology works with NSS volumes on OES 2.
Novell Storage Services is generally the best file system solution for customers transferring file sharing services from NetWare to OES. NSS file systems created on NetWare can be mounted on OES servers.
The following characteristics of NSS on OES 2 should be noted in your planning:
NSS volumes are cross-compatible between OES and NetWare. NSS data volumes can be mounted on either NetWare or OES and the data can be moved between them.
NSS devices and storage can be managed in the Web-based Novell iManager utility. NSS also supports third-party tools on both platforms for advanced data protection and management, virus scanning, and traditional archive and backup solutions.
In a mixed-platform cluster with Novell Cluster Services™, NSS volumes can fail over between OES and NetWare, allowing for full data, trustee, and file system feature preservation when moving data to OES. However, best practice requires that you create all of the NSS volumes you need in the cluster on NetWare before you join any OES nodes to the cluster. After that point, you should not create additional NSS volumes or modify any of them until the cluster has only OES servers remaining.
In addition, NSS on OES 2:
Retains all files, rights, metadata, restrictions, etc.
Includes NetWare Trustee access control (richer than POSIX)
Retains file system access (NCP™)
Retains all file system administration and management features
Can be easily clustered with Novell Cluster Services (NCS)
Is best for shared LAN file serving: excellent scalability in number of files; scales to millions of files in a single directory
Supports multiple data streams and rich metadata (its features are a superset of existing file systems on the market for data stream, metadata, namespace, and attribute support)
Is journaled