Opensource
While many organisations have steered clear of opensource technologies in years gone by due to supportability concerns, they are often unaware that many opensource solutions are available with paid support, which lessens any support concerns and helps contribute to product development. Today, some of the best products are developed by the opensource community and on the most part 100% free to use.
Below are a sample of the opensource and ‘freemium’ (free with limits) solutions we are familiar with and would be happy to help implement. Or, maybe it just gives you some ideas of some products you can implement yourself, which is what opensource is all about!
TrueNAS Core
TrueNAS is built on the ZFS filesystem and has the ability to scale from GB to PB worth of storage providing, NAS, iSCSI, snapshots and replication. TrueNAS can easily cater for SMB and NFS protocols, as well as a datastore for VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines.
TrueNAS is a great solution for small and medium businesses looking for a cost-effective, yet enterprise capable on-premises storage solution.
For more information: TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise
NetBox
For many organisations, the ability to document their environment is required to assist not only with troubleshooting, but in many cases also to meet legal and regulatory requirements.
NetBox is a specially designed DCIM (Datacentre Infrastructure Management) tool which has the ability to record IP addresses, subnets, VLANs, devices, datacentre and rack layouts just to name a few capabilities. Much of which is especially useful in MSP environments.
For more information see the NetBox documentation
OpenVPN Access Server
SSL VPN has long been a chosen solution for providing users with secure access to corporate environments and the COVID-19 pandemic forced many organisations to rethink their strategy with regards to remote work.
While there are many solutions out there, OpenVPN is one of only a few long-standing solutions out there that is truly platform agnostic supporting Windows, Mac and Linux clients. It also now supports SAML so it can be integrated directly with Azure AD, Okta or your chosen SAML based identity provider.
OpenVPN Access Server is free for two concurrent connections and can be purchased on a per user subscription basis starting at 10 users. Best of all, these licenses can be pooled across deployments if you want to provide high availability, or are an MSP and want to pool licenses across different customers.
For more information see the OpenVPN Access Server documentation
