Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Peter Allen, our Senior Storage Engineer. There’s plenty to talk about regarding his background and what he sees in store for TrueNAS™, iXsystems’ leading storage appliance based on FreeNAS.
Peter started off as a Corporate Liaison at Blockbuster, Inc where he familiarized himself with the digital cinema and TV broadcasting industries. He was interested in the process of how video can be compressed and streamed over various protocols.
This led Peter to Silicon Graphics(SGI). Peter spent ten years running production IT labs and the Digital Media Research and Development labs. One of the projects he was involved with was the SGI Media Server for Broadcast. With the Media Server, uncompressed video can be recorded live, compressed in real time and replayed to a broadcast system, a video port, a VTR or an IP network.
He has also spent time at Exavio, Inc, working on Fibre Channel SAN solutions and how to provide simultaneous uncompressed & compressed video playback, edit and recording. At PowerFile Inc, Peter worked on Virtual Tape Library integration with heterogeneous network environments. In 2008, Peter started his own business called White Matter Media where he specialized in digital media systems integration. White Matter Media focuses on delivering Open Source SAN/NAS solutions that utilize the DLNA, UPnP, NFS, and CIFS protocols.
Peter was introduced to iXsystems eight years ago through a mutual friend and customer. Peter joined iXsystems when he heard about the integration of PCI NAND Flash from Fusion-io into storage appliances. He is very excited about TrueNAS, a FreeNAS-based, enterprise-level storage solution produced at iXsystems. TrueNAS uses a hybrid storage model consisting of Flash memory, SAS and SATA hard disks. The solution provides reliability, speed, and scalability. TrueNAS comes in three lines: Performance, Archiver, and High Availability.
In regards to TrueNAS, there are many possibilities Peter told me he wants to explore, including but not limited to, integrating Fibre Channel and SAS switch topologies for increased performance and scalability. With the additional technology, he mentioned TrueNAS will have the potential to be a leading storage solution for digital media content creation and distribution. For the future, Peter hopes to see TrueNAS become fully supported across heterogeneous storage networks. With his extensive knowledge of the field, I do not doubt there are bright prospects awaiting TrueNAS. I would like to thank Peter for his time and guidance. There are going to be more blog posts featuring our developer team, so stay tuned!
Lisa Liang
Marketing Assistant
