Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is designed to power diverse workloads so users efficiently consolidate legacy storage systems and achieve universal application acceleration and reliable data protection for data.
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TrueNAS
Score 9.4 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.
For scenarios where the implementation is an Oracle ecosystem and the need for high-performance storage is present, undoubtedly the ideal solution is Oracle ZFS due to the native integration that exists, for example, with SPARC equipment, Exadata, and traditional architecture running Oracle Linux or Solariums (depending on the case), as well as in highly demanding industries in terms of storage.
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.
Software RAIDZ. Create storage arrays using best available RAID technologies for excellent disk stability
Array images and backups. Allows administrators to instantly create disk snapshots, to minimize time disk is unavailable (on the order of seconds, not minutes or hours).
Automatic de-deduplication/compression. ZFS will automatically de-dedup data on disk, allowing for more efficient use of the entire disk for unique data. It will also automatically compress data stored on the disk, allowing for even more usage of the available disk space. Great for infrequently accessed backups (There is some performance cost to compression).
Because it was due to a software originally designed for Solaris. configuration in other environments can be cumbersome for inexperienced implementers.
The proprietary particularity of this File System makes it in some cases very difficult to implement in highly heterogeneous environments.
I think that additional forms of integration with more environments should be created.
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
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.
ZFS is so far beyond the other filesystems available right now, offering full suites of tools for data management, backup, recovery, maintenance, monitoring, etc. It's not even fair to compare them.
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.
In highly transactional and data-intensive environments such as 200 million records per month or more.
Banking also represents an ideal niche for this type of implementation due to its high volume of data and the need for security in this industry with over 100 million records per day and online history maintenance for more than 10 years (in most cases).
The Return on Investment or ROI is clearly seen in the medium term since your storage solution would be in your safekeeping without having to pay anything additional to regular maintenance.
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.
