Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Qumulo is great for media and entertainment companies, that need simple and easy management of a NAS. The product can also scale and be sized to larger shops too. The support that comes with it also can act as an extension of internal IT. Their support is always watching the box when it phones home with hardware errors or if it would go offline. Qumulo is not initially set up well-running virtual workloads, while Vmware supports NFS, some settings need to be adjusted on Qumulo to allow for upgrades to happen while virtual machines are running
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Support, they offer a slack based support which is fast and incredibly helpful. Fast releases, they release new features every 2 weeks and actively seek out improvement ideas from end-users. NFS and SMB co-existent support through mapping permissions allows mixed end users to connect through there native protocol. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Admin users are not able to be tied to SSO or LDAP accounts. At the start there was no RBAC but this has since been addressed. While there is incredible analytics, there is no native way to get historical trends by volume or user. Read full review Support Rating There were some things that can be found by other users on forums and Google and some things that were not.
Read full review Their Slack-based support is like nothing I have experienced. They are fast, helpful, and willing to go the extra mile, even when an issue is not clearly their's to solve. They are committed to your success. The engineers on the Slack channel are oftentimes the engineers that programmed the very same feature you are asking questions about or having issues with.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Qumulo was not the least expensive but we were blown away by support offered and pre-sales support to ensure questions were answered. Our main challenges were mixed end-user platforms and a diverse set of use cases on those end-user computers. Having the dual access to volumes, over NFS and SMB, helps us greatly in this area.
Read full review Return on Investment Low-Cost Network Attached Storage Provides additional network storage to support client & business operations FreeNAS secures our data using custom encryption keys Read full review Reduced cost in support and upgrade times compared to old fiber San. Allows the Service Desk to focus on other things since permissions and access are simplified. Very easy and bandwidth efficient replication allows us to comply with DR. Read full review ScreenShots