FreeNAS vs. openSUSE Leap

FreeNAS suited really well in managing our legacy systems and it handled all our network flows really well, less maintenance is required on our part. FreeNAS also gave the option to switch to TrueNAS for free as now its support is limited. The major issue that we faced was with the installation as it is really complex and required lots of time. Rest all is good and FreeNAS still works well on our systems.

Incentivized

It is a great system for running applications that are not "Windows only". It works very well with application servers like Tomcat or Glassfish. In the development environment, it can run many IDEs like Netbeans for Java or VS Code for Python. It is a great platform for running Docker or Kubernetes. It supports also full virtualization so Windows can be running inside a virtual environment to share the hardware cost.

• 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

• Small footprint.
• Software packages are well maintained.
• Wide range of software packages available in default repositories.
• Predictable release cycle.

• 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

• Faster adoption of latest versions of packages

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

Incentivized

Before swapping to FreeNAS, we'd been using plan old Linux servers running Samba and NFS with ZFS storage underneath. This worked really well for our requirements at the time but required a lot of administration when new versions came along, or new users had to be added or drives needed replacing, and so on. FreeNAS did away with 95% of that work and does a much better job too.

Incentivized

openSUSE Leap has wide variety of already precompiled software packages in default repositories. It even has some specific packages in official repositories that are not available in other Linux distribution repositories. It is also very stable and reliable distro - we can predict when new versions will be released and when we should make system upgrades.

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

Incentivized

• Delivers on stability and features with good community support
• Supports the business with low-maintenance setups

Incentivized