Likelihood to Recommend All in all this series great in addressing issues applications that need flash storage as a backend storage supply. It addresses the need for fast, responsive servers that need to boot quickly. It is easy to use and for the most part there are few issues and none that can't be addressed/fixed quickly.
Read full review For a large, robust, well-secured, and stable storage system, TrueNAS is very well suited. Virtual Machine support is great. Shared filesystems (SMB, NFS, iSCSI, WebDav, AFP) are very well implemented. Time machine support is fantastic; security is very granular. Do not try to use it as a replacement for VMWare... (no migration, etc.)
Read full review Pros Dell Compellent support (Co-Pilot) and the add-on service (Optimize) are critical services that Dell Compellent does very well. Alerts from the array are sent to Co-Pilot where tickets are automatically generated and customers are notified of events. Of greater importance at times is the proactive support Co-Pilot and Optimize provide by contacting us of inefficiencies in the array and consulting on resolutions. Enterprise Manager (Dell's "single pane of glass" management framework) is a useful tool for configuration/evaluation of the array and other Compellent products. Ease of management. From firmware upgrades to managing server volumes the process is much simpler than with other arrays. Read full review iSCSI Datastores for virtualization. NFS store for unix storage or backups over networking. Very fast performance, sometimes outclassing SSD arrays even in NFS. The ZFS filesystem has given use much greater flexibility. Using their newer servers we could in theory scale to any height of required storage. Read full review Cons The GUI could be a little more updated with a lot more information regarding usage. There could be some assistance with high I/O times where snapshots go to consolidate. There seems to be issues when that attempts to occur, and there will times where the virtual machine stuns due to the I/O intensity. Modification of multiple volumes or the creation of multiple volumes is a pain in the DSM management console. Read full review more graphical interface to admin features like plugins, jails, list are well but a tiles aproach will be better allow bulk upload/download/update to Groups or user accounts from SMB shares. some script language template featured to create/config/change/delete storage pools /dataset or shares . Read full review Likelihood to Renew The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?
Read full review Usability The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login
Read full review Support Rating This is not solely based on the support engineers themselves but more so that the logging and gotcha's that their array has. There have been multiple times where logs are pulled, but the folder is not large enough, and it crashes the array. Other times there are certain aspects that support either does not know of or isn't knowledgable about how to look at particular issues that could be causing problems.
Read full review The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We selected Compellent solely based on price. Honestly I would rate it only slightly better than a QNAP we used (which was even cheaper). If performance and reliability are factors in your decision (and they should be) I would recommend looking at something like a VNXe.
Read full review Having a better, trusted filesystem to build upon makes a huge difference. I want to know that if something I've written is read, it was the thing I wrote. And if it can't be read, I want to know that soon and know how to repair it.
Read full review Return on Investment The SC9000 has been able to serve our current and futures needs well enough to not need to upgrade anytime soon. Read full review Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware. Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives. The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing. Read full review ScreenShots