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[forbin]

This is probably the stupidest of all questions, but I have no shame, so here goes. I humbly ask, what would be the benefit to us of using TrueNAS Core or anything similar, rather than simply a standard Linux box? We have 100+ RHEL servers in production, and all the protocols we commonly use are available on standard Linux, such as SMB, rsync, NFS, and iSCSI. We're comfortable with manually managing volumes, filesystems, snapshots, etc.. Why add a new product and learning curve to the mix? This is a sincere question. I feel like I must be missing or misunderstanding some important factor.

 

[Ericloewe]

Two reasons, one because it's not RHEL and one specific to TrueNAS:

1. No fiddling around getting ZFS installed. This has slight disadvantages, but TrueNAS tracks OpenZFS pretty aggressively - unlike something like Ubuntu LTS.
2. SMB is probably the most significant pain point among what you've mentioned. TrueNAS makes it pretty easy even in more complex scenarios.

 

[forbin]

Two reasons, one because it's not RHEL and one specific to TrueNAS:

1. No fiddling around getting ZFS installed. This has slight disadvantages, but TrueNAS tracks OpenZFS pretty aggressively - unlike something like Ubuntu LTS.
2. SMB is probably the most significant pain point among what you've mentioned. TrueNAS makes it pretty easy even in more complex scenarios.

Thanks for the reply. Are you aware of any advantages in terms of performance?

 

[Ericloewe]

Performance is likely to be a wash.

 

[Arwen]

One other note, a standard RHEL build will include lots of other servers, (though not all running). In a TrueNAS, (or any other dedicated NAS), they tend not to include unneeded services. Admins would have to manually add the "plugins", "jails", VMs or "containers" as desired or needed. (And KNOWING they exist on their NAS.)

If you intend to make a RHEL server as a dedicated NAS, then be cautious on what software you load on it.