Houston UI: the easiest way to see it working
If Ceph and ZFS are the engine, Houston UI is the dashboard — and it’s the fastest way to actually see what “open source storage” means, rather than just read about it. Houston UI is 45Drives’ name for a set of modules built on Cockpit, Red Hat’s open-source web-based server admin console, extended with 45Drives’ own open-source plugins for storage-specific tasks.
(placeholder — add a real screenshot from your own deployment)
What you actually get in the dashboard
- File sharing — configure SMB, NFS, and (on supported backends) S3 shares from a
browser, without hand-editing
smb.confor/etc/exports. - ZFS management — create pools, manage datasets, schedule snapshots, and watch pool health, all visually.
- Ceph deployment — bring up single-node or multi-node Ceph clusters through a guided
Ansible-backed workflow instead of raw
cephCLI commands. - User and identity management, hardware health, benchmarking — day-to-day server administration without needing to live in a terminal.
It’s a real, actively-maintained open-source project
This isn’t a proprietary UI 45Drives built once and stopped touching — it’s a family of public GitHub repositories, actively maintained, that anyone can inspect, fork, or contribute to:
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
cockpit-file-sharing |
Manages Samba, NFS, iSCSI, and (for supported backends like Ceph RGW, MinIO) S3 shares |
cockpit-navigator |
A full-featured web file browser |
cockpit-zfs-manager |
Interactive ZFS pool/dataset administration |
cockpit-identities |
User and group management |
cockpit-hardware |
Hardware health monitoring for 45Drives storage servers |
cockpit-benchmark |
Built-in storage benchmarking |
cockpit-ceph-deploy |
Guided Ceph cluster deployment via Ansible |
Why the “quick and easy show” matters
Distributed storage and copy-on-write filesystems are genuinely complex under the hood — that complexity is exactly why the industry has historically sold them wrapped in expensive, proprietary management consoles you had to trust blindly. Houston UI makes the case that you don’t have to trade transparency for usability: the dashboard is friendly enough for day-to-day administration, and every module behind it is public source you (or anyone) can read.
See it yourself
Nothing here beats seeing it live. Head to Build Your Own for a real, documented walkthrough of standing up this exact stack — Ceph or ZFS, Samba/NFS/S3, and Houston UI on top — using 45Drives’ own open-source tooling.