Gartner held their 35th annual IT Infrastructure, Operations, and Cloud Strategy conference in Las Vegas from Dec 3-6. iXsystems was invited by Gartner to participate, representing both FreeNAS and TrueNAS. The conference was a great opportunity to get the pulse of the enterprise market, listen to Gartner analysts speak on a wide range of topics, and have some fruitful conversations with IT Directors and other vendors.
One of the key themes was “Infrastructure is everywhere”. It’s in the Data Center, Colocation facility (Colo), Cloud, and increasingly at the Edge. Data Centers are gradually reducing in number across the industry, but Cloud, Colo, and Edge are all thriving. Cloud is growing even though many users reported very little cost savings. TrueNAS and FreeNAS are deployed in Colo, Edge and Cloud environments with all the benefits of a common software base and straightforward replication. “FreeNAS is everywhere” is the messaging used in many iXsystems presentations, which syncs nicely with Gartner’s view of the world.
“The Edge” is the new industry term for remote offices and other sites where data is stored and processed. With the advent of IoT (Internet of Things), there is a need to process video, telemetry, and other data closer to the source so that less data needs to be transported to and stored in the Cloud or Colo. With plugins and VMs, FreeNAS and TrueNAS can be classified as one of the leading Edge (pun intended) platforms.
Gartner was bullish on Software Defined Storage (SDS) and mentioned FreeNAS as an option for any of their 4 categories of SDS: File, Block, Object, and Hyperconverged. One of the analysts referred to the adage that products can be Cheaper, Faster, or Better, but you can only pick two of three. In reality, this problem is solved with a range of products; FreeNAS (cheaper, faster) and TrueNAS (faster, better). The combination of FreeNAS and TrueNAS, the TrueNAS family, provides a unique capability that delivers the benefits of “Open Source economics”.
Morgan Littlewood, Senior Vice President
