In our recent review of the Drobo 5N2 NAS, I said it was for people that needed a NAS, but didn’t want one. My point was that there are many individuals and small organizations that would benefit from basic NAS features, without getting bogged down in more sophisticated options.
For those not in that camp, FreeNAS has been around for over a decade. Their recent 11.1 release adds some notable features. The big ticket items is support for public cloud syncing, which should support sync, movement, and copying to an S3 compatible target. The lack of such a feature was a big drawback on the Drobo, so it’s nice to see it on FreeNAS out of the box. It makes implementing a true 3-2-1 backup solution that much easier.
The OpenZFS file system also gets some performance enhancements for large files, including a Resilver Priority configuration option. But the most interesting feature might be Docker container support, which comes via a RancherOS VM. This is still a beta feature right now, but clearly the FreeNAS team knows they need to add the feature to maintain relevance with application delivery.
Read more at: FreeNAS 11.1 is Now Available for Download!
