Software Options

I am excited about ZFS.  This entire project is about giving it a shot.  The promise of a reliable and easy to use file system is too big to pass.  I am excited to learn new things done in my neighborhood - it's not like new file systems appear that often.

FreeNAS

The first contender I considered was FreeNAS.  I love, love, love the idea of booting the system from flash and having a web-based administration GUI.  As a matter of fact, I made these my requirements.  Unfortunately I hear FreeNAS8 lacks in functionality and all versions of FreeNAS, by virtue of being based on FreeBSD, lag behind in the version of ZFS.  I also hear ZFS performance is lacking.  I do plan to give FreeNAS a shot!

Solaris 11 + napp-it

ZFS being native to Solaris/Illumian/NexentaCore/OpenIndiana I hope to find here the best features and performance.  Hope that napp-it will offer a functional and friendly GUI.  I understand Solaris has kernel-based CIFS server promising (unlike Samba) a good interoperability with Windows.

We shall see!