in business
FreeNAS
in an Enterprise Environment By the time you’re reading this, FreeNAS has been downloaded more than 5.5 million times. For home users, it’s become an indispensable part of their daily lives, akin to the DVR. Meanwhile, all over the world, thousands of businesses, universities, and government departments use FreeNAS to build effective storage solutions in myriad applications. What you will learn…
What you should know…
• How TrueNAS builds off the strong points of the FreeBSD and FreeNAS operating systems • How TrueNAS meets modern storage challenges for enterprises
• Basic understanding of server technology • Some networking knowledge • Some knowledge of BSD Operating Systems
T
he FreeNAS operating system is freely available to the public and offers thorough documentation, an active community, and a feature-rich platform for the storage environment. Based on FreeBSD, FreeNAS can share over a host of protocols (SMB, CIFS, AFP, NFS, FTP, iSCSI, etc) and features an intuitive Web Interface, the ZFS file system, a plug-in system for applications, and much more. Despite the massive popularity of FreeNAS, most people aren’t aware of its big brother dutifully storing and protecting data in some of the most demanding enterprise business environments: the proven, enterprise-ready, and professionally-supported line of appliances known as TrueNAS. But what makes TrueNAS different from FreeNAS? Well, I’m glad you asked...
intended to be a “FreeNAS” for the enterprise business, complete with around-the-clock support from that very same team. For customers, a support team with direct insight into the base operating system is crucial, saving wasted hours spent investigating possible known issues or configuration missteps. With decades of combined experience in both FreeBSD and enterprise storage software, the TrueNAS Support Team at iXsystems know the
Commercial Grade Support
When a mission critical storage system goes down, an organization’s whole operation can come to a screeching halt. While community-based support is wonderful (and free), it can’t always get an ailing storage server back up and running in a timely manner. Businesses need the responsiveness and expertise that only a professional, dedicated support team can provide. TrueNAS storage appliances provide that safety net. Created by the same technical team at iXsystems that developed FreeNAS v8 for the home user, TrueNAS is
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Figure 1. System Information page of the FreeNAS WebGUI
04/2013