middleware VS GlusterFS

For storage options, most people either purchase a NAS (network attached storage) or re-purpose an older computer using either TrueNAS or unraid. If you're looking to just purchase one, the most popular brand is synology, but their models can be a bit pricey.

https://www.truenas.com/ if you just want to use it as network storage.

Synology if you need prebuilt. If you want to build DIY NAS, take a case that can hold as many drives as you want, take a consumer-grade mobo and Intel/AMD CPU (really doesn't matter for NAS), purchase 1 x SSD for OS and as many drives as you need, deploy something like TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/) or Starwinds SAN and NAS (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas), configure RAID (for redundancy, preferably RAID-6) and share the storage to your NUC as iSCSI/NFS/SMB. The second option will require some effort to accomplish but will be more flexible and deliver more performance.

There is no such thing as an ideal OS. Some of the products are better in some of the areas, while other software is better in other areas. For example, Proxmox is the virtualization platform that is targeting virtualization needs. It has support for software RAID, but it doesn't mean that this is the primary feature that is constantly developed. Any NAS OS basically doing the same but targeting storage and sharing things over the virtualization or anything else. So, you need to use whatever is better for the particular use case. Use proxmox on the virtualization host and NAS OS as a storage engine. Or run hypervisor and NAS OS as the VM. As per the alternatives to OMV, you can take a look at Starwinds SAN and NAS (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas), TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/), or even pure Debian + Cockpit (https://cockpit-project.org/)

The second is storage. If you need any of the storage sharing, deploy NAS OS as the VM in proxmox, like Starwinds SAN and NAS (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas) or OMV (https://www.openmediavault.org/), or TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/). As you mentioned, you need to cross-flash the perc into IT mode and pass through the controller into VM, but you need a separate from the controller drive for proxmox to be able to PCI-E passthrough the card into VM. Then, configure software RAID and reshare the storage to the proxmox via NFS/iSCSI (that will improve your skills in storage stack and storage protocols).

You can also go another route with Proxmox and NAS OS as a VM. TrueNAS or Starwinds SAN&NAS can be used. https://www.truenas.com/

You would need some sort of NAS device to act as a file server (you obviously can't just plug a HDD directly into a switch). Some consumer routers have USB ports where you can plug in an external HDD, though they frequently have speed issues with the USB ports. You could buy something from QNAP, Synology, etc. or build your own TrueNAS.

I run plex on my lab, but if I didn't have that, I would probably buy a cheap server and run TrueNAS. https://www.truenas.com/ I personally have a whole vmware network using it for storage, but as just a plex server with a bunch of storage would be a viable alternative for a single host and have the storage plus the raid benefits of not having to worry about disk failures.

Take a look at TrueNAS or Starwinds SAN&NAS as a NAS OS options. https://www.truenas.com/

Windows built-in iSCSI server is slow. If you don't mind replacing it, try using TrueNAS, Starwinds SAN&NAS, or even Linux (Ubuntu Server) VM running the iSCSI target server. Either solution should overperform the Windows alternative.

https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/issues/894

And apparently apart from modern coreutils using that, it is mostly gentoo users hitting the bugs in lseek.

This Product Appendix does not apply to online service offerings managed by Red Hat or generally available open source projects such as www.wildfly.org, www.fedoraproject.org, www.openstack.redhat.com, www.gluster.org, www.centos.org, okd.io, Ansible Project Software or other community projects.

Just because Red Hat will stop selling commercial support for their product, does not mean GlusterFS itself is dying. It's an open source project like any other - https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs

https://www.gluster.org/ Is the way to do this across nodes

This allows us to fetch the desired quality of the video as per the user's request, and once the media file finishes processing, it will be uploaded to a distributed file storage such as HDFS, GlusterFS, or an object storage such as Amazon S3 for later retrieval during streaming.

GlusterFS

But where can we store files at scale? Well, object storage is what we're looking for. Object stores break data files up into pieces called objects. It then stores those objects in a single repository, which can be spread out across multiple networked systems. We can also use distributed file storage such as HDFS or GlusterFS.

GlusterFS - same as above (https://www.gluster.org/)

What you look for is a clustered file system. Like https://www.gluster.org/. As long as all units are closeby with low latency there are a couple solutions that allow you to create distributed storage solutions of various kinds. Key value stores applenty, clustered file systems that pretent to be one file system etc. If you have geographically distributed solutions with high latencies it becomes harder. Most open source systems don't work really well in this scenario. There were a couple attempts like Hydrabase but they didn't go so far. It normally is solved by doing two clusters and then replicate between them.

I'd imagine most managed service providers are going to require a credit card, though most of them have a free tier. If you want to take an unmanaged approach, maybe look into Gluster. I've used it before and never had issue with it, but I also had an infrastructure team that set it up, so I'm not familiar with the challenges that way: https://www.gluster.org/