iXsystems TrueNAS Reviews?

[decoy5657 0]

I, or anyone, can definitely get you a VNXe3200 w/ 20TB USABLE for WAY less than your budget.

[storedge 0]

Hope I'm not too late to the party here -- we have three TrueNAS units in production (at two locations), all working as advertised. Two Z20s and a Z35. Two of the units have HA (which is what I think the OP was referring to when he said "clustered configuration"). The Z20s are general purpose file stores using NFS and a couple of iSCSI volumes for VMWare (20 or fewer VMs, lightly used). They're remotely replicated between data centers. The Z35 is the performance machine -- we've got about 3TB of l2arc in that baby, running hundreds of VMs. Performance is actually way more than we need -- we probably even could have gotten away with using one of the lower end systems, but now we've got plenty of system to grow into. iX has been really easy to work with -- they set the machines up and tune them for you based on your workload, though I've done plenty of tinkering myself since We had one of the controllers fail on the Z35, and it was replaced the next day -- meanwhile the system kept chugging along without interruption. The experience has been positive and we've been happy with our decision to transition from NetApp and not get locked into another one of their contracts. The cost to renew our one Netapp support contract was actually more than the first TrueNAS Z20s combined! It was a no-brainer.


And, what's up with this notion that ZFS doesn't perform well? Just last year, Oracle had set the SPC-2 performance record with their ZFS appliance: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/2226303

ZFS can be plenty fast, it just needs to be tuned to your workload and record size and have your cache configured properly. I looked over the FreeNAS Mini review on here (I have a FreeNAS Mini too -- that's actually how I found out about TrueNAS) after one of the guys in the thread noted that it performed poorly in random throughput, and it looks like that's because the reviewers didn't block-align properly (if at all). You can indeed tune ZFS to perform well in 4K benchmarks (it's 128K native). but 4K tests are pretty meaningless, anyway. What applications actually run 4K anymore?

Tegile is based on OpenSolaris, by the way. NetGear is ZFS on Linux (read: scary!)


Hope this helped!

[decoy5657 0]

Tegile sounds like the perfect array for you. I (can) sell them and I like them for smaller shops like you. Well worth investigating.