Hi - I have used TrueNAS for various tasks over the years and have decided to look deeper into Rockstor. What are peoples views on using it in small / medium business? I have about 30 users with less than 1 TB of data. I am contemplating giving Rockstor a go.
Does anyone have any feedback?
@ilium007 welcome to the Rockstor community.
I think we have a few forum members that are using it for a SMB scenario. In principle, this should work well for your use case. Depending on your network setup Rockstor gives you some flexibility on how you want to manage authentication (SMB with local accounts on Rockstor vs. tying it into an AD environment). Rockstor also integrates with most UPS appliances to further reduce the risk of corruption due to power loss, etc. Obviously, like with other NAS solutions, Rockstor is not a backup system by itself, so you still need a backup strategy for that data.
The ability to extend the Rockstor with drives of different sizes (e.g. starting out with a bunch of 4TB drives and as prices come down, gradually add/replace with 8TB drives) without having to remap everything I see as a big benefit, though, considering that if the data requirements remain relatively stable, that might be a rare occurrence.
Since Rockstor attempts to essentially expose/combine underlying btrfs and other functionality that is managed by the upstream distribution (OpenSUSE) I would consider this a fairly future-proof solution, with a large backing (dev, test, etc.) thatâs independent of what Rockstor continues to do. So, the building blocks (brtfs, networking, docker, etc.) are always tested and vetted by a much larger community than what Rockstor represents, which is good. Using ECC memory is another dimension that reduces the risk of data loss.
Finally, unless OpenSUSE drops support for btrfs (which, at this time seems very unlikely), even if Rockstor for some reason would not be further developed 4 or 5 years from now, you can take the data pools and import them into a mainstream OpenSUSE installation.
In the context of separation of duties in a business setting it might be better to use Rockstor only as a NAS without the additional features it has (maybe the wsdd Rockon within a windows network setup). However, especially in a smaller business setup, having the ability to also run for example run a VPN server for remote access on top of it (and tailscale/wireguard based enjoys growing popularity and is considered very secure at this time), might prove useful.
Of course, thatâs how I would approach it, but at this time I canât speak from experience, as I am using it only for personal data needs in a home environment. And my experience has been mostly positive in terms of uptime and reliability. For example, I had unstable PSU issues at some point, but it fortunately didnât result in data loss, despite running RAID5/6 back then, I have since then also migrated to a RAID10c3 setup). I replaced all disks with higher capacity ones, which did take a long time, but went without a hitch.
Some of the issues you find here on the forum are related to older and/or exotic hardware variations. Rockstor (like OpenSUSE) runs on a wide variety of hardware, and the users have made some interesting combinations work (sometimes without issues, sometimes with quite a bit of effort including inputs from the community here). Thatâs a great strength of Rockstor I think though for a biz setup I would focus on configurations that have fairly recent components to reduce the risk of running into issues.
My 2 cents, but I hope, there will still be some business users that can give better input on this.
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Probably the only other thing I would add is that while Rockstor offers a paid subscription for stable updates and direct technical support, it doesnât offer business grade (eg. with service level agreements) support.
If thatâs something your business needs, it might not be suitable. On the other hand, for those of us happy to use the forum or wait on an email response, the support for subscribers has always been good.
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@mattyvau Just a quick correction re:
There is not additional support offered to Stable Updates subscribers: although inevitably it can be easier to approach support when the system in question is running a Stable, or late testing Release Candidate (RC) status rpm as they are just way-less experimental.
We do have the long-standing aim of providing Paid Support :
An âIncident-based Support subscriptionâ is a âSupport includedâ variant of our âStable Updates subscriptionâ.
But as-yet there has been insufficient interest/funds/resources to reach this particular goal given most (human predominantly) resources in the project have been focused on improving/modernising our code-base and production capabilities. But it remains a goal and has recently seen some refinement/attention regarding how it would be implemented in Appman.
Hope that helps, at least with some context.
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Thanks for the replies - I have paid the subscription while I test. Its looking promising so far. Just trying to work out BTRFS snapshots so that I can run my Restic backups from the server / snapshots.
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