FreeNAS vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
FreeNAS
Score 5.4 out of 10
N/A
FreeNAS is an open source operating system that allows nearly any hardware serve as a network-attached storage device. It was developed by iXsystems.N/A
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution mainly used in commercial data centers.N/A
Pricing
FreeNASRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FreeNASRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FreeNASRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
User Ratings
FreeNASRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
FreeNASRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Likelihood to Recommend
FreeNAS suited really well in managing our legacy systems and it handled all our network flows really well, less maintenance is required on our part. FreeNAS also gave the option to switch to TrueNAS for free as now its support is limited. The major issue that we faced was with the installation as it is really complex and required lots of time. Rest all is good and FreeNAS still works well on our systems.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is well suited for cloud environments, fast deployments and to run non-intensive apps/tools (with low memory and low cpu consumption).Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) might not be suited for really huge databases and intensive CPU processing.
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Pros
  • The FreeNAS web interface is modern looking. It makes tasks like provisioning drives into raid volumes easy.
  • The ZFS raid option allows you to add in an SSD as a cache drive to increase performance.
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  • Virtualization, like the operating system level task. I see this product is very good and it blends very well with the middleware components like all the JBoss and other things. And other than that, either you install it or a virtual machine or physical servers, it works seamlessly anywhere. And if you want to go further, like Red Hat OpenShift or those things also work very nice with it.
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Cons
  • Not good for beginners as it requires deep understanding of networking and storage.
  • Most of the good and required features are not available in free version.
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  • Well, one of the things, this ties right back to my previous answer from what it sounds like, the cloud platform for Insights doesn't currently have an easy way to generate CVE compliance reports, or do scans for where you have remediations required, but it does not currently produce those reports in a way that I could just hand off to our security team and be like, here's our compliance, here's where all the things are specifically because Red Hat does backporting of patches and a lot of security tools don't know how to handle that and think that we're vulnerable when we're not. So from everything I've heard, it's possible. That's why I'm excited for it. But it's not easily pushed button generated report yet. So we're working with them to get that in there.
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Likelihood to Renew
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We find RHEL to be a superior OS with stable operations and long life. It is also easier to use and fix then most other OS's.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distro is the simplest enterprise version of Red Hat that is enterprise supported and when you deploy as many VMs as we do, it is vital to have that enterprise support. On top of the enterprise support, having access to a commercially supported backbone for updates and upgrades is a huge plus.
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Reliability and Availability
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Product support and regular patches.
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Performance
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As with any OS enhanced testing will need to be done prior to application integration.
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Support Rating
There were some things that can be found by other users on forums and Google and some things that were not.
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Red Hat support has really come a long way in the last 10 years, The general support is great, and the specialized product support teams are extremely knowledgeable about their specific products. Response time is good and you never need to escalate.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Don't be afraid of it, its easy to install and configure for the tasks needed.
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Alternatives Considered
Before swapping to FreeNAS, we'd been using plan old Linux servers running Samba and NFS with ZFS storage underneath. This worked really well for our requirements at the time but required a lot of administration when new versions came along, or new users had to be added or drives needed replacing, and so on. FreeNAS did away with 95% of that work and does a much better job too.
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It's superior. I mean they're all Linux so it's all that code, but I find that the intangibles that you get with Red Hat, meaning the enterprise support, the lifecycle, that's what clearly makes it better than the rest of them.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
Operational ease of use backed by support
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Return on Investment
  • Low-Cost Network Attached Storage
  • Provides additional network storage to support client & business operations
  • FreeNAS secures our data using custom encryption keys
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  • RHEL provides a good base OS and additional tool sets for various deployments.
  • We are able to use Satellite to manage hundreds of OS's behind our corporate firewall. No other OS provides the level that RHEL does.
  • It is a known good quantity. Their support for the OS is amazing.
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ScreenShots