Concretely, for whom and why

Replace a Synology or TrueNAS that's run out of room

50–300 employee company, generalist IT, NAS hitting saturation

• • Storage 95% full, salty hardware renewal quote
• • No dedicated NAS expert on the team
• • Need to keep classic SMB shares for end users

Deploy the OVA, migrate your shares over a weekend, automatically archive files > 6 months to S3 at $5/TB/month. Users see no difference (transparent stub recall).

Notaries, lawyers, healthcare — long-term retention

Firms with 10+ year retention obligations

• • Growing volumes of cold archives that are legally mandatory
• • Rare access, but must remain immediately retrievable
• • Immutability required (anti-tampering)

S3 tiering to Wasabi or immutable MinIO, local stubs for search, scheduled immutable snapshots. Classic SMB access for users, archives transparent in the background.

Video, design, archi — large dormant volumes

10–200 person studios, finished projects sitting around

• • Wrapped projects to keep around for reuse
• • Very episodic access on archives
• • Mac workflow (SMB or AFP-like) to preserve

Caelum exposes a Mac-friendly SMB share (signed, encrypted). Projects inactive > 3 months move to S3 and get recalled on read when a compositor reopens them.

Standardize on a stack you can repeat

MSP managing 10–100 SMB customers

• • Juggling Synology, Windows Server and TrueNAS at every customer
• • Hard to keep skills sharp across five stacks
• • No central monitoring

1 OVA, 1 UI, 1 stack. 10-minute deploy at every customer, same REST API everywhere. Central monitoring (roadmap), single support contact.

Get off NetApp / Isilon without pain

IT director with end-of-support NetApp FAS, €80–300k renewal quote

• • Enterprise hardware renewal is no longer budget-defensible
• • NetApp migration usually = 6–12 month project
• • Active-passive HA to preserve

SMB scanner pointed at the NetApp export, streaming incremental copy, cutover via DFS-N. Prod-grade 2-node HA included, 5–7s RTO.