Best options for upgrade of an Oracle Solaris NAS

[NYCone]

I am a Unix/Linux novice. I've picked up a little over the years as I've learned how to set up my firewall and NAS.

I've been using an Oracle Solaris/Napp-it AIO NAS for as long as I can remember. I currently have 3 local copies of data (about 8.5TB each) on two different machines, and 2 copies distantly on two machines.

One of my local pools started to throw errors, and I decided to get some new drives for a new pool (the drives in that pool had 7 years of power on time). In rebuilding my machines, I started to recognize the current weaknesses of Solaris as an OS. I don't have access to their updates (unless I'm missing a method of receiving them without buying them) and I began to think I should switch to FreeBSD.

To that end, I'm in the midst of a Send/Rec from a Solaris pool to a FreeBSD pool. My logic is without the Solaris updates, I'm better off with FreeBSD security and updates.

My general questions are:

1. What's best practice locally for data copies? I was planning on two Z3 pools and one Z2 pool (either on one or two machines).
2. What's best practice distantly for data copies? I was planning on two Z3 and one Z2 pool on two machines.
3. I'd like to harden up security of the pools. I tried to pipe an unencrypted pool to an encrypted pool via Send/Rec. It didn't work. What's the practical way to make this change?
4. Is my assumption true, is FreeBSD the better choice if I can't access Solaris updates?

Thanks

 

[gea]

In all my tests Solaris with native ZFS was always the fastest and most efficient ZFS server. While support is guaranteed until 2036, there are no longer free updates. Private use without a paid subscription is no longer an option.

As only a very old ZFS v28/5 is compatible between Solaris and Open-ZFS v5000, you cannot use zfs send or pool move between. To transfer data you can use a simple SMB copy (use robocopy as it preserves Windows ACL) or rsync.

For local data copies or for any backup operation locally or remote, prefer zfs repliaction as it preserves ZFS properties and keeps checksum protection intact.

On Solaris and native ZFS you can zfs send an unencrypted filesystem to an encrypted filesysten. It will then inherit encryption. On Open-ZFS you can additionally raw send an encrypted filesytem to an unencrypted destination.

Feature wise Open-ZFS is quite identical on Free-BSD, Linux, Windows and the Solaris forks like OmniOS or OpenIndiana. The Solaris forks inherited the low resource needs from Solaris and the unique ZFS integrated multithreaded SMB server with support for local Windows SID and SMB groups, ntfs alike ACL and troublefree ZFS snaps as Windows previous versions.

Especially OmniOS is my favourite OS as it has some unique enterprise class features like ZFS in its native environment, a long term stable every 2 years, a stable every 6 months, a bloody with newest features and around a security update per month. Additionally a paid commercial support option is available. Unlike Solaris, this is OpenSource and the updates are free, OmniOS Community Edition