That said, it might be conceivable to do something like the following:
- have down-times i.e. when you sleep and automate a shut-down script
- then – to wake-up in the morning – one could use the BIOS wake-up with an auto-login script
- then it could be put in hibernate with a wake-on-lan.
- yet another idea is that if this is a laptop a timer could be put on the plug such that the battery charges and discharges effectively halving the electricity usage..
- finally, if it were possible to have FREENAS run as a virtual machine on a machine that is actually doing something of use, it would get rid of the need for a redundant device

Another solution might be to see if change requests could be put to the FREENAS team to develop power-management solutions at software level.

Just thoughts. I will admit to not being as knowledgeable as many of you on this forum.

If the “process monitors” can access your “central office”‘s network, then there’s no reason why not. A NAS box is just storage that hangs off the network. When you mount it (IE: as a drive letter in Windows), the “process monitors” won’t know that it’s not a local drive.

You use the term “web accessible”, which is different than being able to be mounted as storage, which a NAS is – a NAS doesn’t necessarily run a web server. The “process monitors” can write a log file as they normally do, but the drive will be located in your central office. You’d still have individual log files for each, as they’re still each writing their own log file.

The main thing is that if the machines running the “process monitors” can’t access the “central office”‘s network, then a NAS won’t help – it’s just a device on the network – no more or less acessible than any other device on that network.

HTH.