Overview

The Trellis NAS Bridge Appliance (aka Trellis NBA or TNBA) makes it easier to access files from one location (i.e., a client) even though the files may be stored on different computers (i.e., different file servers or network-attached storage (NAS) devices), and different operating systems. The servers might also be under the control of different systems administrators. With Trellis NBA, these files can still be accessed using the file system model, instead of via an explicit file-copy model.

A client creates a single mount point to the appliance and the TNBA creates (internal) mount points to the other servers. Therefore, a number of different NAS devices are virtualized by the TNBA. Note that, using virtual machines from VMware or similar, the client and the appliance can (optionally) be running on the same physical machine.

Currently, the client-to-TNBA protocol is CIFS/SMB and the TNBA-to-NAS protocols include CIFS/SMB and Secure Shell. The TNBA bridges (e.g., translates between) different client and server protocols using a variety of techniques, including whole-file caching.

The Trellis NBA benefits greatly from open-source systems including (but not limited to) Linux, OpenSSH, SAMBA, FreeNAS, m0n0wall, and minihttpd. Our particular technique of using Secure Shell to securely access servers, possibly over wide-area networks and multiple administrative domains, is a contribution of the Trellis research project.

Main contact: Paul Lu, (paullu ``at'' cs.ualberta.ca)

The Trellis NBA is provided as-is with no warranty of any kind. You should follow good back-up procedures with your data. We welcome all bug reports, but use this software with care.

Download and Documentation

The Trellis NAS Bridge Appliance (TNBA), version 1.0, as submitted to VMware.

The expanded Step-by-Step Documentation , with screenshots, is on-line.

The expanded FAQ is on-line.

The main Trellis Project page, with relevant academic papers.