As a NAS operating system, FreeNAS has been out there for a decade. Working on the beautiful marriage of FreeBSD and ZFS, it's been tried and tested by many users within the storage community, to great success. But if you're one of those people who is more into Linux and Btrfs, you may be yearning for an alternative.
Over the past few months here in the 45 Drives lab, we have been putting an exciting new NAS OS through its paces on our Storinators. After working through a few kinks, such as how to set up redundant boot drives, we are ready to introduce Rockstor as one of our recommended solutions to create a solid NAS appliance when installed on a Storinator (alongside the traditional OS option, FreeNAS). I am writing this post to talk about why I like Rockstor, its Linux+Btrfs roots, and to share a bit of the story of how we got here.
Welcome, Rockstor.
Some
of you may already be familiar with, or at least have heard of, Rockstor,
a Linux + Btrfs-powered NAS OS. I, and the rest of the 45 Drives team,
first heard of Rockstor when founder and lead engineer Suman Chakravartula
contacted us back in November 2014 as a prospective hardware partner. We were pretty
excited with the idea of helping a new NAS appliance gets its footing – it’s
just another example of how the storage community really is a collaborative
environment, and one that we’re proud to be a part of.