Huawei OceanStor vs. TrueNAS

We connect the Huawei OceanStor SAN device directly to the Huawei Fushion Servers, without using the SAN Switch, with 16 HBA cards in MESH topology. Each of the two controllers has four 16 HBA inputs under the name of SMART IO. In addition, there are two 8 GB extension ports. VMware virtual machines are running on hosts. Our ERP applications, critical DBs, and business applications are running in these. Again, we use another SAN under a different cluster in the disaster recovery section.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• The Huawei OceanStor Dorado All Flash NVMe storage array provides maximum performance.
• The OceanStor Dorado is ideally suited for use with databases, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Virtual Machines, and file server environments.
• The capital and maintenance costs were very competitive for a similar storage system at other storage vendors.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Support desk to be available.
• Implementation to new people is not that easy.
• Setting of the advance features on Huawei OceanStor may not be easy to all users.

Incentivized

• 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 .

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?

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

When purchasing support for your Huawei OceanStor system, there are two support options offered by Huawei (i.e. Hi-Care and Co-Care). Huawei Hi-Care service is when Huawei responds to your technical requests for remote troubleshooting and advance hardware replacement in the shortest possible time. Hi-Care provides onsite technical support to help you maintain a more efficient and stable network environment and improve network productivity. Whereas, Huawei Co-Care service is a collaborative solution delivered by Huawei certified partners. Depending on the capability of your Huawei support partners, I would recommend Hi-Care for mission-critical environments since this ensures Huawei takes responsibility for meeting the support SLAs. If you have very capable Huawei support partners, then Co-care could be a more cost-effective support option.

Incentivized

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 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.

All Flash NVMe SSD technology is currently at the top of this business. Its disk structure is hundreds of times faster than traditional mechanical SAS systems, but also compared to today's SSD systems! It has a much more affordable price than the devices of the same class. In addition to these, we had a lot of hesitation when we decided to give up the competitor brand and buy a product that works reliably and smoothly, but we researched and learned very well. We made the right choice.

Incentivized

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.

• Searching of information is effective and faster.
• Different data type storage.
• Analytics provided are valuable.
• Reporting is easy.

Incentivized

• 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.