FreeNAS is an open source operating system that allows nearly any hardware serve as a network-attached storage device. It was developed by iXsystems.
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TrueNAS
Score 9.2 out of 10
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TrueNAS is a network-attached storage featuring all-flash and hybrid storage editions, from iXsystems headquartered in San Jose.
$0
per month
Veeam Data Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Veeam’s® premier product, Veeam Backup & Replication™, delivers availability for all cloud, virtual, Kubernetes and physical workloads. Through a management console, the software provides backup, archival, recovery and replication capabilities.
$428
per year per 5 instances
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FreeNAS
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Veeam Data Platform
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Veeam Data Platform Essentials
$428
per year per 5 instances
Veeam Data Platform
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FreeNAS
TrueNAS
Veeam Data Platform
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No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
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Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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No
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Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
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Veeam sells through channel partners. Contact a partner for detailed pricing and quotes. Resellers or sales personnel are available for assistance.
I chose TrueNAS (upgrading from FreeNAS) because of the small footprint, ease of use, and reliability of the ZFS file system. The file sharing protocols supported as well as the intuitive interface all make TrueNAS a great choice for business and hobbyists alike.
Verified User
Manager
Chose TrueNAS
FreeNAS is great system for a secure NAS facility, TrueNAS adds a lot of feature that outperform it's cousin if you are interested in containerization and in scalability too.
The support with TrueNAS is where it really shines. You can get support that if you purchase hard drives from them, they send replacements as soon as one fails. Automatically. If you have nodes in your server they will do the same. They also do advanced replacement, you …
Veeam Data Platform
Verified User
Executive
Chose Veeam Data Platform
Our previous backup solutions required a great deal of maintenance and were not dependable and required a lot of monitoring.
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.
We have many TrueNAS units deployed and they've served us well everywhere. Our most common use case is using it as storage backing for virtual machines. We have Proxmox talking to it, as well as having it acting as the hypervisor. We've never lost data with it, even when faced with multiple disk failures. We've also always found the performance to be robust and able to handle the needs of our clients. Our clients range from libraries, to medium sized enterprises and we've always been able to make it work, and work reliably.
For Windows, it is a great option. Just loaded it and get detected by the server. At that point you could forget about your backups. For many Linux servers, it would work fine. The webservers and scientific servers backed up and restored with no problems. Avoid databases with heavy load. We found this to be Veeam Data Platform's weak spot.
The ease of use in creating jobs and adding clients enables our new and less skilled administrators to work efficiently, quickly, and accurately.
The same ease of use is essential for junior admins as well. Backups are quickly and accurately restored, allowing our networking team to bring clients back to production within expected times.
The ability to create a restore for testing and to remove it quickly has proven to be an excellent asset for our production and DB teams.
On occasion, the 'reason' for a failed backup can be a little hard to understand. It would be nice if it were a bit more straightforward.
I would love to run the platform natively on Linux, but I don't think it's an option.
Sometimes, locating the correct update file for the platform software can be a bit confusing. If they had an option to download the correct update file from within the console, that would take some of the guesswork out of it.
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?
I really have no complaints about Veeam Backup & Replication. Their service has been excellent and the cost is minimal in comparison to other services I checked out. Implementation wasn't simple and the Veeam Support team was there to help each step of the way.
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
It is a very robust solution that has never failed. It also has perfect integration with Windows server volume shadow copies. The processing load is moved from the backup server to the backup proxy. Increased fault tolerance: you can store data on a separate machine, the backup repository. Can perform a bare metal restore.
I give Veeam Data Platform a rating of 9 for availability because it consistently performs reliably in critical data protection and recovery tasks. The platform is designed to minimize downtime, ensuring that backup and recovery processes are accessible when needed.While there may be rare instances of maintenance or minor application errors, these do not significantly affect the overall reliability of the system. Veeam’s strong architecture and features like high availability configurations further enhance its performance, allowing us to trust it in crucial situations. Overall, it has proven to be a dependable solution that meets our organization's needs effectively.
Veeam does a good job with backing up our servers in a timely manner. We are still at the beginning of our Veeam use and are pleased with the speed at which we can access the system as well as the backups and restore points. Veeam is definitely superior to our previous backup system in terms of speed and accessibility
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.
The support team has never asked me to jump through silly hoops or waste time on pointless exercises. They seem to truly have a handle on what may be wrong. In fact, when we were having trouble getting our license renewal setup (because of yet another license migration at Veeam) a support incident got us connected to the right people to get our renewal done in time.
I rated the in-person training an 8 because it was generally effective and provided a solid foundation for understanding the Veeam Data Platform. The instructors were knowledgeable and engaged, making the sessions interactive. However, I felt that some topics could have been covered in more depth, and additional hands-on exercises would have further reinforced the learning experience. Overall, it was a positive training session that adequately prepared attendees for using the product, but there's room for improvement.
I gave it a rating of 7 because, although the online training offered valuable content and covered the essential aspects of the Veeam Data Platform, it lacked interactivity and opportunities for direct engagement with instructors. This made it challenging to ask questions or delve deeper into specific topics. Additionally, some sections felt a bit rushed, which could hinder a comprehensive understanding of more complex features. Overall, while the training was useful, improvements in interactivity and pacing could elevate the experience significantly.
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.
Plan the process and then work through your plan, i know this should go without saying but its easy to get sidetracked. You tend to want to just get up and running so you can have that sigh of relief, spend the time to talk to your business stakeholder to see what goals they are trying to accomplish and how that may impact your plans first.
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.
I chose TrueNAS (upgrading from FreeNAS) because of the small footprint, ease of use, and reliability of the ZFS file system. The file sharing protocols supported as well as the intuitive interface all make TrueNAS a great choice for business and hobbyists alike.
As I explained earlier, the differences in how each application behaves come down to configuration. In my opinion, Veeam Data Platform is more user-friendly than the other applications mentioned. I’ve already used it at previous companies, so I know what it can do and how far it can go—based on the factors I mentioned earlier that led me to choose Veeam Data Platform over the other applications.
In terms of scalability for our company, Veeam was able to cover our backup needs with ease. They have options for even more individualized backup if we were to need them; i.e. if a specific workstation needs its own independent backup. We have not used these resources yet, but I am confident they will be beneficial to our company in the near future.
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.
