Next Hop deploys storage systems leveraging the power of ZFS. We prefer ZFS for its incredible benefits: integrity, flexibility, speed, ease-of-use, and large base of support.

What is ZFS?

Zettabyte File System (ZFS) is a software package that collapses the functions of logical volume (LVM) and filesystem management into a single stack.

High-level features of ZFS:

• Guarantees data and metadata integrity using cryptographic hashing
• Replaces hardware RAID and other software RAID solutions
• Provides efficient snapshotting at scale
• Allows granular control over datasets for performance tuning
• Provides framework for on-site and off-site replication

Benefits of ZFS

• Copy-on-write (COW) filesystem
• Data integrity (cryptographic hashing; Merkle tree)
• Snapshots
• ZFS send/recieve
• End-to-end encryption during replication
• Deduplication
• Intent logging (ZIL) to eliminate write-holing
• Numerous compression schemes (lz4, zstd, gzip, etc)
• Compatibility with a wide variety of consumer and enterprise hardware
• Per-dataset block size configuration

We like deploying and supporting TrueNAS in our storage systems. TrueNAS provides the following:

• A nice WebUI for administration
• Easy ACL/RBAC management via GUI
• Automated/scheduled tasks:
  • Snapshots
  • Replication (local or remote)
  • Cloud backup integration with S3, Backblaze, etc

TrueNAS is easy to document, train and support.

Containerization and virt

TrueNAS was formerly based on FreeBSD 13, but has been rebased to Debian Linux for the purpose of improving virt and OCI compatibility. TrueNAS has excellent support for VMs and OCI containers.

Use cases

TrueNAS is designed to help users easily manage one or more pools and many datasets. We recommend TrueNAS when storage is the primary use case, but not necessarily for hyperconverged infrastructure where the storage is abstracted into databases and/or consumed entirely by applications. Ultimately, the decision depends on your needs and preferences. There are usually multiple ways to achieve the same goal.

TrueNAS Enterprise

TrueNAS Community is completely free to use. If you have more complex use cases - storage tiering, high availability (HA), Veeam and vCenter integration, FIPS compliance, RDMA - TrueNAS Enterprise is a subscription model sold on custom hardware integrated and certified by TrueNAS/iX Systems and support-inclusive.

Our recommendation will depend on your needs, use case(s) and budget. For many use cases, TrueNAS Community provides plenty of capability and room to grow. Significant cost savings, flexibility and ease of maintenance can be realized by designing with off-the-shelf components.

Other workloads demand specific capabilities under challenging constraints. We can meet both needs. We can work direcly alongside TrueNAS to plan and install your system, and work directly with their support teams as-needed.

Proxmox is a virtualization platform that uses kvm and supports a number of established and emerging virt and OCI technologies. ZFS is a first-class citizen. Unlike TrueNAS, Proxmox is focused on managing many VMs, containers, and complex software-defined networking (SDN). It supports clustering, quorum, ceph, and other advanced concepts that TrueNAS does not. Like TrueNAS, Proxmox is designed to be GUI-operable and user-friendly. It has support for snapshotting and backup automation. It is also Debian-based.

Escape VMware

Proxmox integrates natively with Fibre Channel and iSCSI and has plug-in support for NetApp ONTAP. Many smaller businesses - and some much larger ones - are well into the process of migrating their virtualization workloads away from ESXi/vSphere and into Proxmox.

Cost savings

Proxmox, like TrueNAS, makes all of its core features available at no cost. Both companies offer optional enterprise support subscriptions.