Introduction

Further details are in the following sections:

• Basic Concepts

User friendly Web-UI

Rockstor Web-UI is designed to efficiently manage large and complex storage infrastructure. It is also designed for intuitive user experience, which eliminates the need to read extensive documentation and learning to be able to use it. Below are the feature highlights. See Web-UI for a more detailed explanation.

• Secure access via HTTPS.

• Efficiently perform storage management including pool and share creation, snapshots, NFS exports, etc…

• Efficiently perform necessary system management including directory services, user management, etc…

• Customize dashboard per admin user by choosing relevant widgets and their layout.

• Visualize smart probe data for deeper insights.

• Manage other Rockstor appliances by quick switching.

• Extend functionality using Docker-based plugins called Rock-ons.

• Contact Rockstor support.

Online Disk Management

• Rescan the system for any new disks and make them available instantly for pools (hardware support may be necessary).

• Visualize top disks based on activity.

• Act on disk alerts, repair and remove disks from the system if necessary without unnecessary disruption. See our Disks section for more details.

Online Pool Management

• Create pools instantly using the Web-UI or CLI.

• Resize pools online by adding or removing whole disk drives.

• Schedule scrub operations for periodic maintenance.

Online Share and Snapshot Management

• Create a share instantly using the Web-UI or CLI.

• Resize shares online, thin provision or over provision according to your needs.

• Export shares via NFS, Samba, and SFTP protocols.

• Create snapshots for shares instantly or schedule snapshots to be created periodically.

• Create unlimited number of snapshots for a given share.

• Toggle snapshot visibility to the end user via NFS or Windows Shadow Copy.

• Rollback a share to one of its snapshots.

Share Replication

• Replicate shares from one Rockstor appliance to others. See our Replication section for further details.

Directory Services

• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

• Network Information Server (NIS)

• Active Directory (AD)

NFS Analytics

Server side NFS analytics are available with Rockstor’s smart probes. These probes can be run on demand to collect insightful information about NFS workloads. The following probes are available

• Call metadata for the entire system.

• Share specific call metadata.

• Client specific call metadata.

• Call metadata for each pair of Client and Share

• Call metadata with specific uid and gid information.

A Docker-based Plugin System

Used to extend Rockstor’s features; we call these Rock-ons (Docker Plugins).

Email Notifications

Rockstor includes an easy to use Postfix configuration facility to enable Email alerts on system events and drive health status.

S.M.A.R.T Drive Monitoring

The S.M.A.R.T technology in most modern drives is integrated into Rockstor so that many aspect of a drive’s status can be examined. It is possible, thanks to smartmontools, to receive emails via Rockstor’s notification system when drives have heath issues or when they reach a warning or critical temperature, or even if their temperature varies by more than a configured value over time.

See our guide on using S.M.A.R.T in Rockstor.

UPS Managed Shutdown

By integrating the well established NUT software package and providing a Web-UI, Rockstor NUT configuration aims to make UPS setup easy and straight forward – Defaulting to graceful system Shutdown in the event of power outage and a UPS battery low state. If Email alerts have been enabled, then notable power events will be part of these notifications.

Support

Free and commercial support for Rockstor are available. See Support for more information.