Jon Parker
Cadet
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2016
- Messages
- 2
Hello-
My name is Jon, my focus is in the home or Family NAS / server solution.
I spent almost 20 years as network engineer/administrator for various companies - and in my spare time I was really into the Windows home server platform (v1 and 2011), until MS decided to drop that product line. Since then been trying to find a good all around replacement that was open source and relatively easy to administer.
I'd originally looked at FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault, Amahi and others and kind of got put off by the built in limitations each platform was implementing as far as BTRS, ZFS as well as greyhole etc. I'm a little hesitant about the learning curve involved with ZFS, only because to me it looks like it combines the complexity of HW Raid solutions with the fallibility of trying to run Software raid. Don't get me wrong, ZFS also has tremendous benefits as far as speed and reliability... it's just a learning curve just like anything else and once you commit to it, if you want to try another platform it doesn't look like you can just move the hard drives from one system to another, mount them and go about your business.
I still love the ease of administration of WHS2011 or SBS 2012, but long term it's a dead end as MS just isn't interested in this type of small scale environment.
As WHS2011 is getting long in the tooth (and doesn't do storage pools) I decided to commit to Amahi for a year or two in order to really give it a chance. Dead simple to setup and run, but small developer/testing team and overall the solution feels like a dead end, as they are still focused on the app store / plugins approach to add capabilities to the server.
I just recently had to reinstall Amahi, and got curious about what progress has been made in this space so started looking around at the alternatives, and I found the FreeNAS 10 beta announcement. As I learned more it really seems like the dockers approach really has the potential to blow everyone else out of the water. Abstracting the add-on/plug-in solution from the base platform is one of those HOLY CRAP kind of things as it makes it a level of magnitude easier for anyone (App developer or server admin) to learn one method of packaging a solution and then making it available to anyone on any platform to install and build on. The development team for the OS can just focus on making it easy to add containers vs trying to learn and vet other companies solutions well enough to repackage into some kind of a one click plug-in. Rockstor seems to be taking a hybrid approach to the same thing, but from an outside perspective it seems like they are taking the limitations of the plug-in system and grafting onto the Docker container approach in order to rebrand containers as 'Rock-ons'. LOVE the pun-centric naming approach and the clever play on words involved, but outside of that it seems like the FreeNas implementation should be both easier and more robust.
Short version: VERY excited to see the potential that you guys are building into FreeNas 10! Trying to learn all I can about docker and docker containers to better understand if and how I could potentially run either Windows or Mac applications within a container environment (on linux / freenas) if at all possible. I'm still new enough to docker that I'm not 100% sure if that type of cross-platform container can work, or if it has to be an app that is natively compatible to the host OS or not. In any case it will be fun to learn and experiment with!
My name is Jon, my focus is in the home or Family NAS / server solution.
I spent almost 20 years as network engineer/administrator for various companies - and in my spare time I was really into the Windows home server platform (v1 and 2011), until MS decided to drop that product line. Since then been trying to find a good all around replacement that was open source and relatively easy to administer.
I'd originally looked at FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault, Amahi and others and kind of got put off by the built in limitations each platform was implementing as far as BTRS, ZFS as well as greyhole etc. I'm a little hesitant about the learning curve involved with ZFS, only because to me it looks like it combines the complexity of HW Raid solutions with the fallibility of trying to run Software raid. Don't get me wrong, ZFS also has tremendous benefits as far as speed and reliability... it's just a learning curve just like anything else and once you commit to it, if you want to try another platform it doesn't look like you can just move the hard drives from one system to another, mount them and go about your business.
I still love the ease of administration of WHS2011 or SBS 2012, but long term it's a dead end as MS just isn't interested in this type of small scale environment.
As WHS2011 is getting long in the tooth (and doesn't do storage pools) I decided to commit to Amahi for a year or two in order to really give it a chance. Dead simple to setup and run, but small developer/testing team and overall the solution feels like a dead end, as they are still focused on the app store / plugins approach to add capabilities to the server.
I just recently had to reinstall Amahi, and got curious about what progress has been made in this space so started looking around at the alternatives, and I found the FreeNAS 10 beta announcement. As I learned more it really seems like the dockers approach really has the potential to blow everyone else out of the water. Abstracting the add-on/plug-in solution from the base platform is one of those HOLY CRAP kind of things as it makes it a level of magnitude easier for anyone (App developer or server admin) to learn one method of packaging a solution and then making it available to anyone on any platform to install and build on. The development team for the OS can just focus on making it easy to add containers vs trying to learn and vet other companies solutions well enough to repackage into some kind of a one click plug-in. Rockstor seems to be taking a hybrid approach to the same thing, but from an outside perspective it seems like they are taking the limitations of the plug-in system and grafting onto the Docker container approach in order to rebrand containers as 'Rock-ons'. LOVE the pun-centric naming approach and the clever play on words involved, but outside of that it seems like the FreeNas implementation should be both easier and more robust.
Short version: VERY excited to see the potential that you guys are building into FreeNas 10! Trying to learn all I can about docker and docker containers to better understand if and how I could potentially run either Windows or Mac applications within a container environment (on linux / freenas) if at all possible. I'm still new enough to docker that I'm not 100% sure if that type of cross-platform container can work, or if it has to be an app that is natively compatible to the host OS or not. In any case it will be fun to learn and experiment with!
