TrueNAS Enterprise

The standout feature was simply the size of the unit - it is not large, but despite this it manages to house a ton of storage that is more than sufficient for our current needs. Another plus was the TrueNAS SCALE software - because it is free for personal use, I use it at home on my own system and thus was familiar with it off the bat. Having a platform I'm already familiar with makes for a simple choice when it comes to NAS solutions. Finally, the support package offered with the device was competitive and comprehensive, satisfying the needs of our department and then some.

All of our servers, both the ones I built myself using the community edition OS and the ones we purchased through ixSystems/TrueNAS have been rock solid, offering maximum reliability and excellent performance.

Mostly the user interaction. On the product side, I have a ridiculously easy dashboard which tells me at a glance what I need to know, what I need to do and where to do it. Menu's and UI are exceptionally thought through. On the company side, the advisory counsil (recurring meeting with TrueNAS management & users, I am one of the latter category) where we - the users - get to voice our opinions on features, roadmap, market approach and strategic direction (but also on which stickers are cooler) is exceptional. But most importantly of all, in essence it's a NAS system. It houses files. I have not lost a single file or document since using TrueNAS. It does what it needs to do exceptionally well without hassle, difficulties or complaints.

Setup and configuration is a little clunky, particularly when you're using the text-based console UI to configure the network components of the system. I don't recall specifically what terms were used that threw me off, but I did end up having to search Google to get clarification on what I was supposed to put in specific fields. It's a PEBKAC error, undeniably, but it could be alleviated by using more common terminology. I also had some issues with Active Directory integration - We have two AD servers and a two-way trust between them, and auto-configuration did not pick up on this. Thus, I had to manually configure this component. I feel like this use-case is common enough that auto-configure should be able to catch that. My biggest dislike is probably the simple fact that SMB does not automatically turn back on should should the winbind service turn off. We had a network outage that caused winbind to turn off, which in turn turned off SMB. Upon the outage being resolved, winbind auto-started but SMB did not. I resolved it by editing the service in systemd and that was the end of that issue. I'm not sure if that's done intentionally, but it feels like a bug/oversight.

There's nothing that I dislike about it. If you want me to name the 3 weakest areas though, I offer the following. 1. The migration from FreeBSD to Debian at the OS level does offer challenges for servers that have been in service since the FreeBSD days, as it will require downtime to clean install and reimport the pools. I doubt this applies to many customers at this point though. 2. When using the community edition of the OS on generic hardware, the typical build will use a pair of USB flash drives to hold the OS and those things tend to fail over time. When one fails, it will require downtime to identify which USB drive needs to be replaced unless you had the foresight to label the USB ports properly prior to putting the machine into service. 3. Migrating rsync profiles from an old server to a new server is typically a by-hand process to ensure they map properly to the filesystem and it would be nice to have an automated method to build the rsync profiles on the new server.

Since I am using outdated hardware (HP ML350p gen8) BUT fully 'decked out' with max RAM max CPU max HDD max GPU, sometimes drivers and compatibility require some finesse. Secondly, I would have preferred the development of a GPU widget to go a bit faster, and thirdly (but this really is a minor minor minor thing and completely irrelevant) it would be helpful (for my specific setup) that the connected monitor could show the dashboard at all times.