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[TinTIn]

I understand that I will probably get a biased response to this question so put your unbiased heads on please.

I've found FreeNAS to be an excellent solution and it can easily stand up against some of the big players like Solaris, Open Indi, Nexenta, Syneto etc.

Apart from HA (failover) and on the paid distros support I honestly can't see what the other solutions have to offer over and above that of FreeNAS.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks


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[pirateghost]

I would say freenas isn't, but since it's the free version truenas which is indeed an enterprise solution.....


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[TinTIn]

Ok so what are the differences?


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[TinTIn]

There's not much difference here http://www.freenas.org/for-business/ apart from support and HA. Anyway I'm more interested in people's thoughts on FreeNAS or TrueNAS vs the opposition.


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[pirateghost]

There is no opposition. There is only freenas. Lol


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[zambanini]

the update and release process is different.

 

[TinTIn]

Ok but call me old school Id be in no rush to update an enterprise system.


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[zambanini]

then call ixsystem for truenas ;)


anyway, a storage system takes its time.

 

[Ericloewe]

I'd say that the major points are stability and ability to scale.

Non-cutting edge features in FreeNAS tend to be stable enough for it not to matter (I highly doubt other solutions are generally closer to being perfectly stable) and important fixes are rolled out quickly.

As for scale, you should know, you're the guy with the 90 disks. :D Performance also scales through the "throw hardware at it" method, so I'd say that FreeNAS is viable in an enterprise environment.

 

[TinTIn]

Thanks Eric. I hope over the next 5 years I can update you all with my opinion and say yes it is an Enterprise solution.


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[Mlovelace]

Due to the lack of HA-failover I would say no. That is not to say freeNAS doesn't have it's place in an enterprise environment. I deployed freeNAS in my enterprise environment, just not as primary storage, it is the backup target for my NetApp SANs. I would consider TrueNAS to be an enterprise solution because of the HA-failover (although it uses active/passive).

 

[TinTIn]

Thanks Mlovelace.

I plan on using ZFS replication to replicate to another ZFS solution. Therefore in the event of a massive issue whereby the storage would be down for a day or more we could do a DNS resolve to the replicant solution if need be.


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[jgreco]

FreeNAS is the community-based version of TrueNAS, and is in part a test platform for TrueNAS.

I'm not sure I consider high availability on any ZFS system to be an "enterprise grade" feature since this is typically implemented through an arbitration process and a forcible dismount/remount procedure that is ... questionable ... in its technical wisdom.

 

[Mlovelace]

I wasn't sure how the pool was transferred during a controller take over in TrueNAS. Dismount/remount

I think for my money, for our next storage refresh, I'm going to chuck NetApp and go with Nimble storage. Their CASL architecture with adaptive flash is really hard to beat. I will always use freeNAS (maybe trueNAS) for our Veeam backup repo though.

 

[jgreco]

Actually no idea what TrueNAS does... but it's what Nexenta does, and it makes sense.

 

[Mlovelace]

Nexenta has some interesting offerings now that they have partnered with dell.

 

[cyberjock]

I know lots of customers have left Nexenta and tried TrueNAS and been ecstatic at its performance and reliability. I also see people only when things are actually going wrong with their servers (hardware, software, bugs, you name it), and they've been amazed at how expedient support was with TrueNAS. You don't end up with big companies like those you see on the ixsystems.com website because your product is crap... you also don't stay in business long if your product is crap.

 

[TinTIn]

With TrueNAS can you just buy the software and support or do you have to buy the hardware?


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[zambanini]

truenas is a full package. so you also get a few nicer features like enclosure management. there was some bug entry regarding freenas, support and a licence key, have not found more about that. maybe @jkh might answer this

 

[jgreco]

I wasn't about to type a long explanation in on mobile.

Nexenta's a fine solution but I just don't care for it as much as a FreeBSD-based solution, and the Nexenta community edition is more limited than FreeNAS as well. The full commercial Nexenta runs on validated hardware and deployments are certified and supported by Nexenta. It is unlikely that there's a massive difference between TrueNAS and Nexenta in terms of general support or functionality.

Nexenta does offer a "high-availability" cluster module which allows you to run two heads and have one head take over if the other fails. The problem with this in ZFS is that there's a certain amount of risk. You set up an arbitration process between the two filers, where both are considering health (reachability of pool devices, network, each other, etc). Typically if one has a catastrophic problem where it can perform a controlled crash landing, it does so, signalling the other head to "take over!", and shuts down its operation, exports its pool, and allows the other head to import the pool. If one of them panicks or loses power or something bad like that, then the process isn't negotiated, and the surviving head forcibly imports the pool and takes over. This implies a whole bunch of things, including that your SLOG and L2ARC need to also be on shared (SAS) storage, because they're an integral part of the pool.

The problem with this process, especially for things like VM storage, is that there are a lot of windows for data loss. The underlying mechanism, ZFS, isn't really designed for this, but you can get close. In practice, it may be just fine because you don't ever really want to have to do a cutover and at the point where you do, the choices are between a nonoptimal (and possibly slightly data-lossy) operation and the worse option, having a service outage.