Hypothetically speaking, one-off support tickets with 2 options one for normal business hours reply and one for emergency 24\hr support, and HA come to mind currently.
As it's architected today, HA wouldn't be useful if licensed apart from the TrueNAS hardware, unfortunately. In order for it to reliable and for us to guarantee uptime, the code requires intimate knowledge of the specific NTB bus, midplane, SAS expander, etc.
As for support, we do offer it if you're using our server hardware for FreeNAS, and we'll also do professional service engagements for customer deployments of a certain size that are using FreeNAS on non-iXsystems hardware.
The reason why we don't offer support in general for other hardware is that it's very hard for us (or anyone) to provide a positive customer experience. I'll explain:
In order for any storage system (*especially* ZFS) to function well, there are at least a dozen pieces of hardware (and their associated firmware) that all need to play nicely with one another, all the way down to the model number and firmware of the hard drive being used, for example. When using other hardware (either from an OEM like Dell or HP, or a system built by the customer), we find that the majority of customer issues are caused by hardware or firmware incompatibility and/or configuration issues. However, if we aren't familiar with that specific model of, say, Lenovo server, we then need to spend a lot of time combing through hardware model numbers and respective firmware before we can even begin isolating what the issue might be. This leads to protracted, iterative troubleshooting, prolonged support calls, and sometimes it results in unsolvable issues or the need to involve a separate hardware vendor's support team who likely has no clue about our software.
We know this because early on in the FreeNAS days we tried this model. Customers weren't very happy, and it was incredibly difficult for us to charge fees that would cover our costs that customers would still be willing to pay.
And, this is certainly not unique to FreeNAS/TrueNAS. Frankly, it's a common issue with all software-defined scale-up storage, as evidenced by the way other companies have addressed this issue over time:
Early on in the software-defined storage (SDS) days, they all said, "Install this software on *any* x86 hardware and you can have a 'NetApp on commodity hardware.'"
Fast forward a couple years, and the ones that were still in business said, "Install this software on something from this specific list of components on our Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and you can have a 'NetApp on commodity hardware.'"
Fast forward a couple years, and the even smaller group that were still in business said, "Buy one of these specific Dell/HPE/SuperMicro models, and they'll either come preinstalled with the software, or contact us, we'll do a hardware check, and if it's approved, we'll give you the software for you to install."
So, at that point you're essentially buying and building a "disaggregated appliance" from two separate vendors, which increases complexity, costs the same or more, and ultimately costs you more operationally to support.
This is more or less where we are today in the world of scale-up SDS, which is why many of our competitors are no longer around. When it comes to making storage reliable for around the clock operation, it turns out that intimate knowledge of the hardware really
really matters. Scale-out SDS makes this a bit easier, but it comes with a host of other issues and extra costs.
Sorry for the long-winded answer, but as much as we'd love to offer support for "FreeNAS/TrueNAS CORE installed on
anything", you probably wouldn't be super happy with the experience, and you likely wouldn't save any money (and certainly not time) over simply having purchased a system through us.
