Synology now requires users to purchase their own branded HHD’s if they want to enjoy all the functions of the NAS. Can we get a promise from iXsystems that they will never follow this model? Thank You.
Never is a very long time, of course. But since they’ve never sold iX-branded drives, it seems exceedingly unlikely that they’d (1) start, and (2) lock their open-source product to use only them, in any foreseeable amount of time. They do tie certain features to an enterprise license on their hardware, but I don’t see that drives are a live concern for a good long time.
Since the whole business model of their open-source product seems to be to allow people to use it for free on their own hardware, and then essentially act as beta testers and a source of feature requests, I think the likelihood of them requiring iX-branded drives for the open-source product to be basically nil. It’d be an absolutely bone-headed move that would kill the community and any interest in TN.
However, as pointed out, they do sometimes tie features to their enterprise hardware, so that’s a much greater possibility, but not one most people here would need to worry about since they’re using the open-source product on their own hardware. Even so, it also seems very unlikely anytime soon, since iX has never sold iX-branded drives anyway. Moreover, AFAICT, iX is a much smaller company than Synology. Selling specially-branded drives would require some special contract with a HDD vendor to develop and maintain a custom firmware. Synology is large enough to have this kind of vendor relationship with one of the big HDD makers, but I don’t think iX is.
Finally, I think such a move, even for their enterprise HW, is very unlikely. Companies usually only go down the lock-in path like this when they’re dominant enough that they think they can force customers into it. Synology is the top company in this market, so they’re trying to squeeze customers for more profits with this move. A much smaller competitor would be dumb to try the same thing.
One other comment to the other’s responses.
It may be in the future that iX sells their own branded drives, (more likely a type of flash, NVMe or SAS), so that they can control the firmware better, and feature list, (for their purpose). However, if this were to occur, it would almost certainly be for their Enterprise Data Center customers. And not locked in for the free users.
To be clear, if you buy an Enterprise version of a TrueNAS server, (both hardware and software), you almost certainly get storage devices with it. Those would be under warranty for a while. Or even a more general purpose support contract. So those WOULD be supplied by iX today. Probably from normal storage vendors.
Of course, their is now a separate fork of TrueNAS, HexOS. They’ve appeared to make the GUI more SOHO, (Small Office, Home Office), friendly. But, as far as I know, it is software only, no included hardware. So again, no storage tie in.
On the subject of guarantees, the world has moved on, to the point where any statement made today, could be invalidated tomorrow. Even Google is no longer “Not Evil”.
Customers purchasing enterprise systems (hardware) could be informed of such requirements prior to investing in an XI System. That would be fair and proper. Most users on these forums use what’s called “community version” and expect the freedom to choose the hardware we use, from cpu, memory, or storage device. “Do no Evil” works if there is no money involved. You brought up HexOS… I am not in anyway suggesting that at some point XI drops support for TrueNas Community and gently pushes folks over to HexOS.
Morgan was so bothered by the suggestion that he edited my thread title.
Well, in someways Fork is not the correct word. HexOS is more like a new, (but optional), front end to TrueNAS SCALE. I say optional because if you use the iX version of TrueNAS SCALE you don’t get the “extra” front end.