FreeNAS vs. IBM z/OS

FreeNAS is well suited for most storage serving scenarios, whether it be for an office file server, backup destinations, data replication across the internet, or as backend storage for virtual machines. It can serve various types of clients via a plethora of standard protocols and can easily integrate with existing infrastructure using LDAP authentication and so on. It's pretty simple to use (it helps to have at least a basic understanding of the underlying technologies) and almost maintenance-free. One scenario that springs to mind that it may not be appropriate for (yet) is as S3 storage. However, S3 functionality was added in a recent release and may have improved greatly since then. I'm sure it will eventually work very well for this.

Incentivized

IBM z/OS, more specifically Omegamon, has access to a lot of relevant information for monitoring but a 90s interface with little or no ease of use and/or maintenance.

• The FreeNAS web interface is modern looking. It makes tasks like provisioning drives into raid volumes easy.
• The ZFS raid option allows you to add in an SSD as a cache drive to increase performance.

Incentivized

• provides infrastructure metrics
• provides historical transaction behavior
• provides metrics on vital components for z/OS

• Not good for beginners as it requires deep understanding of networking and storage.
• Most of the good and required features are not available in free version.

Incentivized

• end-to-end requests
• correlated metrics of vital components
• facilities to consume historical transaction data

IBM needs to update, modernize and improve the usability of the Omegamon interface

There were some things that can be found by other users on forums and Google and some things that were not.

Incentivized

FreeNAS effectively uses all resources really well and it is highly recommended for in premises NAS. It has unlimited ROI as it is really free and open-source. The only payment we need to pay is when we need any support from those guys. FreeNAS helps us to effectively do our work with the legacy systems as it manages all the components really well. FreeNAS although rebranded to TrueNAS will still be there until our legacy systems run.

Incentivized

IBM needs to update, modernize and improve the usability of the Omegamon interface

• Low-Cost Network Attached Storage
• Provides additional network storage to support client & business operations
• FreeNAS secures our data using custom encryption keys

Incentivized

• We need to have Observability on the Mainframe