Q&A with Tom Mortensen: Founder/CEO of Lime Technology and creator of Unraid

[SpencerJ 109]

Update: The answers to these questions can be found in our new blog

 

 

For an upcoming blog, we’ll be publishing a Q&A with Tom Mortensen, the Founder and CEO of Lime Technology and creator of Unraid.

 

This is where you, the Unraid community come in:

 

For the coming weeks, we’re opening up the floor to you all to ask Tom (@limetech) a question. Anything and everything is fair game-- just drop your question into this forum thread and he’ll do his best to get as many answered as possible (can't guarantee every question will be answered).

 

The floor is yours!

 

 

Here’s a little more info about Tom from our website:

Tom began his career in enterprise-storage at a start-up company called Maxstrat. Maxstrat was one of the first companies to offer disk array products and was ultimately purchased by Sun Microsystems in 1999. After the Sun Microsystems acquisition, Tom worked in their Network Storage Division as a system architect, and later for other start-up companies before starting Lime Technology. With his passion for electronic media and background in storage, he knew there had to be a better way to store and stream media content throughout his home, so in 2005 he invented Unraid to protect and manage his media files. Unraid was a new twist on an older technology that didn’t require all the devices in an array to be continually spun up, thereby reducing power consumption, and increasing the lives of the drives. Tom is very excited about what the future holds for Lime Technology as we continue to be on the forefront of digital media storage innovation. On a more personal note, one of Tom’s favorite hobbies is brewing beer.

 

[kizer 90]

1. Are there any big features or solutions you'd like to see come to unRAID that might be a ways out?
2. Is there anything that you would like to see brought to unRAID that the community could lend a hand bringing to light? There are several Talented people that love to tinker. 
3. With everything "going to the cloud" do you ever see unRAID being a part of it?

 

Sorry I didn't see the "A Question" Feel free to pick one from the 3. 😀

 

[SuperUnplex 1]

Is there plans to have multiple arrays on a single license?

[Alphacosmos 0]

I would love to see an offical version of the nvidia and dvb intergrated into unraid so drivers can be added as required. 

[Zusmani 1]

Why wouldn't you allow unlimited drives under a pro license? 

[ItsMeMark 11]

Can you promote SpaceInvaderOne? He's the only reason I use Unraid.

[Glassed Silver 5]

2 hours ago, SuperUnplex said:

Is there plans to have multiple arrays on a single license?

Extending on that I'd love an easy and obvious path to use SSD storage in a protected way beyond just mirroring two SSDs.

 

Maybe filesystem snapshots getting backed up in intervals to the main array.

 

I'm sure I have other questions, but that's all that comes to mind right away.

[bonienl 941]

How does your "dream" machine look like (hardware wise)?

[ken-ji 131]

2 hours ago, Alphacosmos said:

I would love to see an offical version of the nvidia and dvb intergrated into unraid so drivers can be added as required. 

I'd like to see an official way to build and add in-tree and out-of-tree drivers so we can have driver support for the odd piece of hardware that may have no businees being part of Unraid, but the user would like to really have.

 

Will you ever plan to have patch packages, so that if there is a big vulnerability with say Samba, you can release a patched version of it without having to roll out a new version of Unraid (specially in the middle of an RC)

 

Sorry for the extra Question.

[bastl 114]

German beer or your own beer? 😁

[B1scu1T 1]

Given the rocky road it appears to have ahead, do you see Unraid moving away from Slackware at any time in the future?

If so, how do you see this affecting existing users on 6.xx?

If not, are you expecting Limetech to have to take on the workload of maintaining an OS in any way?

 

 

[binhex 452]

As the industry continues to switch from spinning hard drive to SSD as capacity increases, how do you foresee unraid will evolve to meet the different challenges that solid state hard drives bring?

Just to be clear I'm talking in relation to array drives, cache is a known solved problem running SSD.

Sent from my EML-L29 using Tapatalk

[servidude 1]

Are you the original author of emhttp?  Do you still get to do any coding?  If so do you do most of it by yourself?

 

Thanks for this slick, powerful OS!

[KidCastro 0]

What is one thing that makes you proud and one thing that you look forward to for Unraid?

[ken-ji 131]

2 hours ago, B1scu1T said:

Given the rocky road it appears to have ahead, do you see Unraid moving away from Slackware at any time in the future?

If so, how do you see this affecting existing users on 6.xx?

If not, are you expecting Limetech to have to take on the workload of maintaining an OS in any way?

 

 

@B1scu1T would like to know what you mean by rocky road ahead

[Mizerka 3]

Big thanks to you and  your team, overall solid product and happy to continue using it.

 

Q1:

 

Do you plan to develop the hypervisor functionality further? such as including common gpu hardware drivers like nvidia, amd or intel for VM passthrough, which is currently achieved through community projects.

 

Q2:

 

SSD's are currently experimental and not fully supported, do you plan on bringing them along with nvme drives as future data mediums change (also ties into q1 in terms of drivers)?

 

Q3:

 

If you were to start the whole project again where would you focus your time or ditch some features/projects altogether?

[1812 315]

multiple. cache. pools. ? (and multi-arrays too) ?

[mukow 3]

I would to know if Unraid has any plans to release an official API.

[joshstrange 2]

I might be in the vast minority but I can only run desktop servers (i.e. towers not rack-mount). There are a number of reasons for this: sound, power, space, and knowledge (I’ve built computers since I was I was 14 and have a good grasp on that, SAS/backplane/etc is foreign to me and frankly scares me).

 

For all of these reasons I’m currently running 3 UnRaid servers. I have one “main” server where all the heavy lifting happens and then 2 “storage” servers that might have 1-2 containers running on them max.

 

My question is: do you foresee UnRaid as ever supporting “multiple servers acting in coordination”?

 

I’m fine paying for a license for each (and I have 3 pro license) but storage management across the servers is a pain and it would be nice if they could work together a little better. Currently I just use nfs mounts to the main server but I’m almost always running some rsync command to move data off a full drive/server to another one. Also with things like docker swarm or kubernetes I wonder if there is a better option that what I’m currently doing.

 

Thank you for an amazing product!

[Lavoslav 2]

What would be a thing that you would like unRAID to have that it does not currently have if developement time, money or other constraints were not an issue?

[laterdaze 0]

Well, if you're "very excited about what the future holds for Lime Technology", then please share that with us...

Edited June 18, 2019 by laterdaze

[johnny121b 4]

Any plans for adding support for LTO backup?

 

Speaking as a data hoarder, I know my server has grown to a size such-that a catastrophic failure would be almost impossible to recover from, yet 1:1 backup options are limited IF you want LONG TERM storage.   Hard drives don't last for decades in cold storage, and I suspect many of us are only one good power surge away from disaster.  A UPS and power conditioner transformer only protect you so far.  

Edited June 18, 2019 by johnny121b

[itimpi 561]

8 minutes ago, johnny121b said:

Any plans for adding support for LTO backup?

 

Speaking as a data hoarder, I know my server has grown to a size such-that a catastrophic failure would be almost impossible to recover from, yet 1:1 backup options are limited IF you want LONG TERM storage.   Hard drives don't last for decades in cold storage, and I suspect many of us are only one good power surge away from disaster.  A UPS and power conditioner transformer only protect you so far.  

I handle backup by replicating everything that is on my Unraid server to my brother’s Unraid server and he does the same in reverse.     That way we both have an off-site parity protected copy of all our media and critical files and both copies are in a ‘live’ state.   We do not bother with having a local backup as well although some might like to have that as well for absolutely critical data.

[busa1 7]

Do you see any advanced virtualization tools coming to unraid such as VM cloning, snapshots, IP management of VM’s, oversee other VM’s of other unraid machines, and managing those?

[Squid 2184]

Not sure if I'm disappointed or not.  I had it in my head (based upon the avatar) that Tom wore Hawaiian shirts all the time.