NSS is a 64-bit file system that can manage a virtually unlimited number of file objects. It provides visibility, a trustee access control model, multiple simultaneous name space support, native Unicode, user and directory quotas, rich file attributes, multiple data stream support, event file lists, and a file salvage subsystem. NSS employs a journaling file system that lets you create bigger volumes that activate (mount) quicker, store more data, and resist corruption better than non-journaling file systems. It helps improve the scalability, flexibility, and availability of your storage devices.
With NSS, you can use less memory and gain more speed. It requires only about 1 MB of server memory to activate a volume, independent of the number of files it contains, and you can activate up to 256 NSS volumes concurrently per server, up to the available server memory. And it takes only seconds to mount a NSS volume instead of minutes.
NSS improves storage availability, I/O performance and fault tolerance. NSS has software RAID support for RAIDs 0, 1, 5, 10, and 15. It makes devices shareable for use in a cluster. It provides full support for filenames in the Long, UNIX, DOS, and Macintosh name spaces. NSS also delivers full support for all file attributes and multiple simultaneous data streams for DOS, Windows, UNIX, and Macintosh.
To help prevent access to data that circumvents normal access control, NSS leverages an array of different capabilities. It encrypts data volumes according to U.S. Government security standards. It provides data shredding (up to 7 times) for deleted files to erase files completely. It ensures data integrity by preventing unauthorized access to shared media in storage area networks. Additionally, NSS uses the Trustee model to greatly simplify access control management in the file system and restricts visibility of data structures so that users only see subdirectories they have the rights to see.
To protect data from corruption or loss, NSS employs multiple methods to ensure that the most current copy of your data is recoverable. It takes pool snapshots to provide point-in-time views of data and backs up files from snapshots of data so that all files, including open ones, are backed up. It performs immediate data saves by writing data to the volume at regular intervals in order to reduce the seek time on the drive. It includes a salvage file subsystem that recovers files, directories, and volumes that were deleted by applications or from the terminal/console commands.
To help you maximize your available space, NSS compresses inactive files according to preset parameters. It limits the amount of space a volume can consume in its pool, limits the amount of space a subdirectory can consume, and limits the amount of space a user’s data can consume. Additionally, NSS supports up to 4 billion (10E9) files in a single directory. So, how you organize files is limited only by the application or file browser, not the file system.
All these capabilities combine to help you effectively manage your shared file storage for any size of organization, scaling from small businesses to even the largest of organizations with hundreds of thousands of employees.