eRacks: The Value of a NAS Is in Its Open Apps, and the Storage Should Be Open Too

CAMPBELL, Calif. - EntSun -- eRacks Open Source Systems today published its case for open NAS (network attached storage) systems, prompted by a September 19 XDA Developers article in which the writer kept his Synology NAS but replaced almost every Synology app with open-source ones: Immich for photos, Navidrome for music, Plex and Jellyfin for video and Paperless for documents, all running in Docker containers.

The writer's reasons were specific: Synology Photos had gone without major new features, the music app was thin, and Synology discontinued its own video streaming app, leaving a basic DLNA server. He also valued that open apps can move with him to other hardware.

"A NAS is storage plus apps, and appliance vendors sell the two as one box," said Joseph Wolff, founder and CTO of eRacks. "Once the apps are open and run in containers, the box is just storage, and the storage should be open too. We have been saying that for years."

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eRacks NAS systems default to ZFS, an open-source file system that checksums every block, in a RAIDZ2 dual-parity layout that survives two drive failures. The company offers an IT-mode host bus adapter so ZFS sees each drive directly, uses standard NAS drives (currently the 24TB Seagate IronWolf Pro by default), and ships Ubuntu LTS, Debian, TrueNAS Community Edition, OpenMediaVault or other operating systems on request. A ZFS pool exported from one machine imports on another running a current OpenZFS, so the data is not tied to the hardware. The line runs from the 1U four-bay NAS4 to the 4U NAS100 with 102 bays, plus the QUIET3 for homes and offices.

Customers can name the apps they run, and eRacks installs and tests them before the system ships.

The full post is on the eRacks blog: https://blog.eracks.com/2026/09/open-nas-apps-not-the-box/