FreeNAS Corral

Shashank Sharma looks at the popular NAS solution that has been   reborn much like its reviewer.

- Shashank Sharma

The latest release of the popular network-attached storage solution is a ground up rewrite. FreeNAS 10 as it was known during its development is now called FreeNAS Corral because the operating system can now be used to corral data, storage devices, virtual machines and docker containers under one redesigned management interface.

Better support for the self-healing OpenZFS copy-on-write file system that ensures data is never overwritten, support for Active Directory and FreeIPA directory services, and improvements to the backup and replication functionality, are some of the ‘minor’ improvements. ZFS is one of the main reasons for the popularity of FreeNAS. It boasts useful features such as software RAID, known as RAID-Z, and file system snapshots that can be scheduled and stored remotely.