FreeNAS: Flexible, fast storage, and the price is right
By David Newman, Network World January 28, 2013 06:05 AM ET
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It takes something different to stand out in the crowded network-attached storage market. How does free, as in free beer and free speech, sound?
That's the premise behind FreeNAS, the open-source storage software that supports every major file-sharing protocol out there. FreeNAS can look like a Windowsserver or an iSCSI target, among other server types. It's managed by a Web interface that's more intuitive than some commercial storage appliances we've used. And FreeNAS offers the innovative ZFS file system, with built-in integrity checks, flexible and virtually unlimited scalability, and good performance.
In this Clear Choice test, we evaluated FreeNAS on an iX-2212 server supplied by server vendor iXsystems, a major supporter of the FreeNAS project. While iXsystems sells commercially supported TrueNAS systems built on FreeNAS, the company made clear that the software package is free, and can be installed on any PC hardware, 32- or 64-bit.
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