SAN JOSE, CA, April 24, 2024 – iXsystems^®, a global leader in open source solutions and the company behind TrueNAS, today announced the production release of TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 alongside its new series of hybrid storage appliances, the TrueNAS Enterprise H-Series. TrueNAS 24.04 is the fourth major version of the company’s Linux-based data platform software, furthering the mission to provide true data freedom by continually improving on the exceptional flexibility, interoperability, and storage efficiency that has already made TrueNAS the world’s most deployed storage software.

Codenamed “Dragonfish”, TrueNAS 24.04 is expected to be the best-ever version of TrueNAS, representing the next step in major advancements in  security, performance and functionality of the platform over all previous releases of TrueNAS (CORE and SCALE). The 42% growth in the number of organizations using TrueNAS over the past 18 months corresponds to the two consecutive Customers’ Choice awards in Gartner’s annual Voice of the Customer Report for the Primary Storage category. During this same time, users of TrueNAS Enterprise also rated their experiences 4.9 out of 5 in the Distributed File Systems and Object Storage category.

TrueNAS 24.04 introduces SMB and Admin auditing, and the Enterprise support of Restricted Admins and Immutable Snapshots. Additionally, TrueNAS 24.04 has a simplified and improved Share Creation workflow, and open client sessions for both the SMB and NFS file sharing protocols can now be managed from the TrueNAS web UI for further simplicity and efficiency.

TrueNAS Enterprise H-Series

The TrueNAS Enterprise H-Series is the newest member of the iXsystems’ storage system portfolio. Available in dual-controller configurations and with options for hybrid or all-flash storage, the TrueNAS H-Series is designed to provide reliable storage for cost-optimized workloads at the Edge or data center that can scale up to 2 petabytes (PB) in capacity. The series introduces two models, the TrueNAS H10 and the forthcoming H20, both having a compact 2U form factor with these benefits:

• Power-Efficiency: With a typical power consumption of 100-300 watts , the TrueNAS H-Series helps meet your corporate sustainability and environmental initiatives.
• High-Availability (HA): Available dual-controller architecture provides continuous accessibility, providing over 99.999% uptime.
• Expandability: With optional 24, 60, or 102-bay expansion shelves, the H-Series is ready to grow from 20TB all-flash to 2PB hybrid storage.

“The availability of the new TrueNAS Enterprise H-Series, powered by TrueNAS 24.04, exemplifies our commitment to advancing the world’s most widely deployed storage software,” stated Morgan Littlewood, Senior Vice President of Product Management at iXsystems. “The H-Series provides the smallest and lowest power footprint while the M-Series and F-Series deliver Hybrid scalability and All-flash performance.”

TrueNAS Open Storage Community

A testament to the draw of TrueNAS, the TrueNAS^® Open Storage Community has grown significantly over the past several years. Already the most used storage software on earth, TrueNAS saw 42% growth in the number of organizations and individuals using TrueNAS over the past 18 months, while the general market saw slower than expected commercial growth.

“We must always begin by thanking the TrueNAS Community, including those who are also our Enterprise customers, for their tremendous support that has elevated TrueNAS into a  leading position in the storage marketplace, backed by social proof,” said Brett Davis, Executive Vice President for iXsystems. “ At a time when analysts predict as many as 3 in 10 companies will choose a new storage supplier in 2024, we are looking forward to helping those organizations discover why so many others are choosing TrueNAS as the top alternative for conquering their data growth challenges.”

Availability

Both TrueNAS H-Series appliances and TrueNAS Enterprise 24.04 software are now available. The community edition, TrueNAS SCALE 24.04, is also free to download or upgrade to. For more information on TrueNAS H-Series or other TrueNAS Enterprise storage products, please contact iX.

Resources

• For more information on TrueNAS 24.04, please visit this blog
• For more information on TrueNAS Enterprise H-Series, please visit the product page
• To contact iXsystems about TrueNAS Enterprise storage appliances, go to https://www.truenas.com/get-quote/
• To participate in the TrueNAS Open Storage Community, please visit https://forums.truenas.com

About iXsystems and TrueNAS

iX is an Open Source pioneer and the company behind TrueNAS, the world’s most deployed storage software. Relied upon by millions in all 195 countries, TrueNAS is an award-winning universal data platform used by a majority of Fortune 500^TM companies. The platform harnesses the power of the legendary ZFS file system to provide scale-up or scale-out unified storage with the reliability and performance demanded by virtualization, backup, and many other data-heavy workloads. As an alternative to legacy storage systems that are proprietary, restrictive, and often overpriced, TrueNAS helps organizations modernize how they store and protect data by leveraging open storage to simplify operations and drastically reduce cost.

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This repeated recognition was made possible by TrueNAS Enterprise customers investing their time to share their experiences on Gartner Peer Insights™ and further cements TrueNAS’ position as among the top of the category in the Enterprise Storage Market. Our focus is to make our users and customers successful. It is encouraging to see TrueNAS Enterprise improve its already high ratings, and we are also grateful for our Enterprise community whose shared experiences led to this recognition.

Five star ratings were received from 85% of the Gartner Peer Insight reviews of TrueNAS in 2023 This puts TrueNAS Enterprise’s overall rating at 4.9 out of 5.0 stars! When it comes to specific categories, like Product Capabilities, Deployment Experience, Support Experience, and Sales Experience, we’ve maintained impressive ratings of 4.9 and 4.8 stars. The full report can be accessed at https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/4304999 (Gartner Subscription Required).

As a universal data platform, TrueNAS Enterprise earns top-ratings for multiple storage categories. We look forward to competing in the Primary Storage category for years to come, aiming to secure a GPI Customers’ Choice three-peat in 2025. We also look forward to making a strong debut in the forthcoming Voice of the Customer Report for “Distributed File Systems and Object Storage” later in 2024.

TrueNAS Enterprise once again received higher scores than Dell EMC, HPE, and NetApp offerings for Primary Storage.  It’s also worth noting that while some of the comparable products in the Primary Storage category offer only block storage, TrueNAS is a universal data platform that gives customers the choice of block, file, and object storage interfaces as well as applications. Organizations of all sizes, including large Enterprise are among those who rated TrueNAS Enterprise 4.9 stars.

Multi-billion dollar Telecommunications company:

“The switch to TrueNAS was unbelievably easy and overall, I wished it happened sooner. Simple and straightforward experience. We were able to go in with requirements and know quickly if the solution offered was going to be able to meet our requirements. A lot of options are available out of the box that comparable products charge for.”

Government organization in the United States:

“Simple, Fast, And Productive. Communications were clear and concise. Getting the correct solution was simple and did not involve upsells to unneeded products. The responsiveness of the interfaces make it a breeze to make changes or review system configurations. Most configurations are easy to perform.”

$250M mid-sized Service Provider company:

“Easy To Use And Stable Storage Solution. Purchasing was straightforward. Pricing is reasonable. Customer support is quick and knowledgeable. The devices are stable and easy to set up. Our needs were understood, and appropriate product options were presented. Setup was almost plug and play, this made it very easy to integrate and migrate off our old hardware.”

These reviews are just a sample of reviews including all TrueNAS Enterprise appliance, with reviews for the new F-Series introduces in forthcoming:

• https://www.truenas.com/m-series/
• https://www.truenas.com/x-series/
• https://www.truenas.com/r-series/

A sincere thanks to all the customers of all sizes and industries who made this recognition possible. We invite all to read more about this Gartner award here and see what other customers are saying about their TrueNAS Enterprise experiences on Gartner Peer Insights.

Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Primary Storage, Peer Contributors, 23, February 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and PEER INSIGHTS is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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SAN JOSE, CA, March 12, 2024 – iXsystems®, the company behind TrueNAS Open Storage, today announced they were named a Strong Performer in the 2024 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’ for Primary Storage. iXsystems TrueNAS Enterprise was also named a Customers’ Choice in Primary Storage for the region of North America. This is the second consecutive report which has recognized iXsystems, categorizing vendors into four quadrants based on User Interest and Adoption (X-axis) and Overall Experience (Y-axis). Vendors from any of the four quadrants may be the best fit depending on your business needs.

The report can be accessed at https://www.gartner.com/document/5222864 (Gartner Subscription Required).

The “Voice of the Customer” is a document that synthesizes Gartner Peer Insights’ reviews into insights for IT decision makers. This aggregated peer perspective, along with the individual detailed reviews, is complementary to Gartner expert research and can play a key role in your buying process, as it focuses on direct peer experiences of implementing and operating a solution.

Among 79 Gartner Peer Insights reviews for TrueNAS Enterprise over 12 months, 85% received five stars and the remaining 15% received four out of five stars. This aggregate rating for TrueNAS Enterprise remained 4.9 of 5.0 stars in the latest report, also rating 4.9 for Product Capabilities, 4.9 for Deployment Experience, 4.9 for Support Experience, and 4.8 for Sales Experience.

TrueNAS Enterprise appliances from iXsystems are designed for demanding storage environments that require performance, scalability, and reliability. Where most products in the Primary Storage category only provide block services, the TrueNAS universal data platform provides block, file, and object storage interfaces, in addition to the ability to run applications and VMs. Its powerful and versatile primary storage software is built on OpenZFS, offering advanced management capabilities for provisioning, monitoring, and optimizing storage resources. Other notable data optimization and protection features include data compression, encryption, deduplication, and replication, making it ideal for storing and protecting business-critical data.

According to one customer review, “The switch to TrueNAS was unbelievably easy and overall, wished it happened sooner. Simple and straightforward experience. We were able to go in with requirements and know quickly if the solution offered was going to be able to meet our requirements. A lot of options are available out of the box that comparable products charge for.”

Another customer review noted TrueNAS Enterprise to be “Simple, Fast, And Productive. Communications were clear and concise. Getting the correct solution was simple and did not involve upsells to unneeded product. The responsiveness of the interfaces make it a breeze to make changes or review system configurations. Most configurations are easy to perform.”

“Customer voices matter most, and we believe this recognition of TrueNAS Enterprise as a Customers’ Choice for the North American region and a ‘Strong Performer’ two years in a row underscores the business value customers of our enterprise storage appliances and users of open source software rave about,” said Brett Davis, Executive Vice President for iXsystems. “The success of our customers and users is our top priority as they modernize how they store and protect data by leveraging open storage to simplify operations and reduce cost.”

Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Primary Storage, Peer Contributors, 23, February 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and PEER INSIGHTS is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Resources

• For more information about this report, please visit: https://www.gartner.com/document/5222864
• To contact iXsystems about TrueNAS Enterprise storage appliances, go to: https://www.truenas.com/get-quote/

About iXsystems and TrueNAS

iX is an Open Source pioneer and the company behind TrueNAS, the world’s most deployed storage software. Relied upon by millions in all 195 countries, TrueNAS is an award-winning universal data platform used by a majority of Fortune 500TM companies. The platform harnesses the power of the legendary ZFS file system to provide scale-up or scale-out unified storage with the reliability and performance demanded by virtualization, backup, and many other data-heavy workloads. As an alternative to legacy storage systems that are proprietary, restrictive, and often overpriced, TrueNAS helps organizations modernize how they store and protect data by leveraging open storage to simplify operations and drastically reduce cost.

The post iXsystems TrueNAS Named a Customers’ Choice in the North American Region for Second Consecutive Year of the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ “Voice of the Customer” Report appeared first on iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers.

San Jose, CA – February 28, 2024. iXsystems®, the company behind TrueNAS Open Storage, recently conducted a community survey with 741 respondents that revealed which hypervisors VMware customers are considering most as they seek alternative options to maintain business operations. Considering TrueNAS is designed to provide storage for any hypervisor of choice, the survey aimed to capture insights on user preferences for non-VMware hypervisors in this next era.

With the move by many organizations away from Broadcom as the company shifts its strategy for VMware post-acquisition, users have begun seeking alternatives in an effort to avoid steep price increases and the end of VMware’s free ESXi hypervisor. In addition to cost advantages, Open Source software infrastructure is easy to evaluate with community engagement and documentation available, and without need for special hardware or specific software licenses.

For those who can afford it, some will continue with VMware. For the majority who cannot, or have the flexibility to opt out of an uncertain future in the ecosystem, there are a range of options including Microsoft Hyper-V and several solutions based on either KVM or Xen, which are Open Source. Many are considering Open Source alternatives with permissive licenses and collaborative business models that provide organizations with the confidence that they will not be locked into or out of the technology in the future.

All major commercial and open source choices were presented in the survey. According to the results, 17.8% of respondents are considering sticking with VMware despite its higher cost. The top alternatives identified by the survey were based on KVM, or the “Kernel-based Virtual Machine”, which is a free and open-source module for the Linux kernel that allows the Linux kernel to act as a hypervisor. Based on Linux, KVM is the integrated hypervisor for TrueNAS. 58.8% of respondents are considering KVM-based alternatives, contrasting with deployments of other hypervisors such as Hyper-V (11.9%) and Xen-based hypervisors, including XCP-ng (11.5%).

“Open-source Linux has become the dominant operating system by far, just about everywhere. It includes KVM (hypervisor), Kubernetes, containers, and more.” states Marc Staimer, President, Dragon Slayer Consulting. “Alternative open source hypervisors have proven to be strong viable alternatives, most of which are based on Linux KVM, just as open-source storage alternatives such as TrueNAS have become very viable options to VMware vSAN. Again, most of those alternatives are Linux based.”

The survey’s findings underscore the growing role of Open Source infrastructure as a viable alternative to proprietary technology when vendors choose to focus more on profitability and less on the success of those who have standardized on their offerings. In addition to becoming prevalent in nearly all areas of infrastructure, Open Source alternatives have the advantage of interoperability, making them easy to test and evaluate with no need for special hardware or specific software licenses. The added advantages of having community engagement and documentation make Open Source infrastructure faster and easier to integrate and manage in existing environments.

Resources

• For more information on the survey, read our latest blog Top Alternatives for VMware
• To join the discussion and access community resources, visit the TrueNAS Community Forums

About iXsystems and TrueNAS

iX is an Open Source pioneer and the company behind TrueNAS, the world’s most deployed storage software. Relied upon by millions in all 195 countries, TrueNAS is an award-winning universal data platform used by a majority of Fortune 500^TM companies. The platform harnesses the power of the legendary ZFS file system to provide scale-up or scale-out unified storage with the reliability and performance demanded by virtualization, backup, and many other data-heavy workloads. As an alternative to legacy storage systems that are proprietary, restrictive, and often overpriced, TrueNAS helps organizations modernize how they store and protect data by leveraging open storage to simplify operations and drastically reduce cost.

The post New Survey Ranks Top Hypervisor Options as Users Seek VMware Alternatives appeared first on iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers.

Fast Dedup is a major overhaul of the original OpenZFS deduplication capability. One of the primary issues with traditional deduplication with ZFS has been the need to keep the deduplication hash tables in memory at all times to avoid massive performance penalties. This existing functionality led to performance challenges when scaling up capacity and usability issues during operation.

With the introduction of Fast Dedup, there have been several major innovations including:

• The size of metadata is now dynamically sized to fit in either RAM or dedicated flash devices to avoid hitting the performance penalty wall.
• The metadata structure has been completely re-engineered to enable efficient updates using a log append process, greatly improving performance for large updates such as deletions.
• The dedup table will favor dedup-able data and prune blocks that show no dedup potential.
• Combining metadata improvements with properly configured storage, including dedicated metadata flash devices, will improve the sustained dedup performance by over an order of magnitude for larger systems.

Kudos to the Development Team

Led by Allan Jude of Klara, the development team included engineers from Klara and iXsystems. The development was completed in less than a year thanks to the strong OpenZFS expertise of the team. The project was primarily sponsored by iXsystems for use in TrueNAS, the industry’s most used storage platform.

“Klara is very proud of the speed and functional quality of the Fast Dedup development.” said Allan Jude. “We look forward to completing the integration and testing work needed for this to be a standard OpenZFS capability, with no extra cost.”

By contributing the software now, Klara and iXsystems are working to ensure it will have the quality needed to be included in OpenZFS 2.3. The contributed software has gone through preliminary validation and we look forward to wider community testing. Making it available to the OpenZFS community will allow enhanced review and testing with a broader range of use cases and capacities.

“The OpenZFS Community is very excited to receive this major contribution of Fast Dedup software,” said Matt Ahrens. “Fast Dedup has been a major user desire for many years and we are pleased to see that Klara and iXsystems have developed the feature in-line with our general requirements. We look forward to testing and integrating the new software.”

OpenZFS 2.3 is expected to take most of the next nine months to mature and reach release quality and status. These Fast Dedup features will be integrated with TrueNAS SCALE “Electric Eel” along with other expected OpenZFS improvements.

TrueNAS with Fast Dedup

Test software, not to be used for production, is expected in Q2 for TrueNAS SCALE. This will allow validation of functionality and performance prior to a production release.

A formal TrueNAS release with Fast Dedup included is planned for the second half of 2024. This will be in both TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, including the TrueNAS F-Series, M-Series, and R-Series.

“Fast Dedup has been a longstanding desired feature of ZFS and TrueNAS, and can deliver 5X the usable capacity and 20X the performance.” said Kris Moore, SVP of Engineering. “These attributes will significantly improve the economics of OpenZFS storage relative to Cloud storage and proprietary storage, and our team could not be more ecstatic to see this come to fruition.”

Contact the Developers

For more information or to volunteer for the ongoing testing and validation processes, please contact one of the primary developers.

iXsystems is the company behind TrueNAS. You can make an impact in the community by getting to know TrueNAS SCALE now, developing on nightly builds in March, and testing closer to RELEASE later this year. If we can also help your company with TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, book a time to chat with a product specialist.

Klara is a leading developer of OpenZFS and FreeBSD software. Interested in Klara developing software for your OpenZFS project? Contact Klara to learn more about their offerings.

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San Jose, CA, February 14, 2024 – iXsystems®, the company behind TrueNAS, and Klara, a leading open source software developer, today reasserted their joint commitment to open source with the contribution of the Fast Dedup feature to the OpenZFS and TrueNAS communities. In a move sponsored and supported by engineers from iXsystems and the development efforts of Klara, the contribution of Fast Dedup significantly enhances sustained deduplication performance for ZFS and TrueNAS storage systems, marking a new milestone in storage efficiency and performance.

Deduplication performance has been limited in ZFS and OpenZFS since the inception of the file system due to its metadata handling. Fast Dedup ameliorates this with the introduction of a re-engineered metadata structure dynamically sized to operate in RAM or on dedicated flash devices for expedited processing. These advancements collectively enable up to 20 times faster performance and 5 times more usable capacity for certain workloads while greatly improving reliability for systems with deduplication enabled. The technology outperforms legacy dedup by employing algorithms and strategies that scan, identify, and eliminate duplicates, while keeping metadata in RAM and SSDs.

“The OpenZFS Community is very excited to receive this major contribution of Fast Dedup software,” said Matt Ahrens, co-creator of ZFS and the OpenZFS Project. “Fast Dedup has been a major user desire for many years and we are pleased to see that Klara and iXsystems have developed the feature in-line with our general requirements. We look forward to testing and integrating the new software.”

Key Fast Dedup Advancements Include:

• Metadata size is now dynamically sized to fit on either RAM or dedicated flash devices to avoid hitting the performance penalty wall.
• Metadata structure completely re-engineered to enable efficient updates using a log append process, greatly improving performance for large updates such as deletions.
• Dedup table now favors dedup-able data and prune blocks that show no dedup potential.
• Metadata improvements combined with properly configured storage, including dedicated metadata flash devices designed to improve sustained dedup performance by an order of magnitude or greater for larger systems.

“Klara is very proud of the speed and functional quality of the Fast Dedup development,” said Allan Jude, FreeBSD Engineering Manager at Klara “We look forward to completing the integration and testing work needed for this to be a standard OpenZFS capability, with no extra cost.”

“Fast Dedup has been a longstanding desired feature of ZFS and TrueNAS, and can deliver 5X the usable capacity and 20X the performance.” said Kris Moore, SVP of iXsystems Engineering. “These attributes will significantly improve the economics of OpenZFS storage relative to Cloud storage and proprietary storage, and our team could not be more ecstatic to see this come to fruition.”

The donation of Fast Dedup technology is a testament to the shared vision and collaboration between iXsystems and Klara, underscoring their dedication to the advancement of open-source storage solutions. Expected in Q2 for TrueNAS SCALE, Fast Dedup will be available as test software, not to be used for production. This will allow validation of functionality and performance prior to a standard product release later in 2024.

For more information on iXsystems, TrueNAS, or its hardware/software products, please contact iX.

About iXsystems and TrueNAS

iX is an Open Source pioneer and the company behind TrueNAS, the world’s most deployed storage software. Relied upon by millions in all 195 countries, TrueNAS is an award-winning universal data platform used by a majority of Fortune 500TM companies. The platform harnesses the power of the legendary ZFS file system to provide scale-up or scale-out unified storage with the reliability and performance demanded by virtualization, backup, and many other data-heavy workloads. As an alternative to legacy storage systems that are proprietary, restrictive, and often overpriced, TrueNAS helps organizations modernize how they store and protect data by leveraging open storage to simplify operations and drastically reduce cost.

The post iXsystems and Klara Celebrate Valentine’s Day with a Heartfelt Donation of Fast Dedup to OpenZFS and TrueNAS appeared first on iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers.

By keeping it closed, vendors can ensnare customers into a more resource-intensive and expensive model while promising that solutions will be forthcoming. Their goal is to grow fast, improve margins, and extract the maximum customer revenues by preventing alternatives from getting a foothold.

This has been the storage model for decades. Where there had only been proprietary solutions before, Open Infrastructure has become the dominant model for operating systems (Linux), containers (Kubernetes), databases (NoSQL) and many more layers of the stack. So, why has the model for storage remained unchanged when the rest of IT infrastructure has evolved beyond it?

The Open Source Choice

By contrast, Open Storage is built around a mindset of abundance, where the best products and user experience win in the marketplace. The combination of an open-source community, customers, and vendor support yields a confluence of innovation that no lone source could provide.

At iXsystems, we seek to give our customers more choice in how they can store, access, and manipulate their data. We call this Data Freedom, which we define as: what all organizations ultimately want and expect from storage: flexibility and choice. In other words, the freedom to go faster, lower infrastructure costs, and reduce operational effort. In our model, the only “lock-in” we strive for is a user and customer experience so gratifying that customers don’t ever need or want to leave.

Rising Costs

Odds are you’ve seen articles and discussions of increasing hardware prices. Here are two recent examples highlighting expectations that storage will be more expensive in 2024 than it was in 2023:

• Market Anticipates a 50% Price Surge for NAND Flash in Short-Term
• Prices Rise as IT Spending Trends Upward for Servers, Storage

There is no more serious business than protecting data thus storage is naturally the last place where anyone would want to skimp. Vendors prey on this emotion, persuading customers that the value they claim is worth paying more for, and the only way you can be successful. But, the reality is, the “big” brands charge more because they must. Their business model relies on meeting Wall Street and investor expectations, where growth and profit are the only measures.

Alternatives are bad for the status quo, especially when an alternative is rated equally or more highly. One way for an alternative to rate more highly is to be focused on delivering what the customer wants/needs as opposed to the vendors’ business model.

What Can I Control?

If you are part of the selection process for infrastructure vendors, what’s most under your control is your “short list”. Alternative brands often cost less as they are in a “challenger” position against the leading brand. Any organization has the option to consider “challenger” brands and non-commercial tools. What might have been the best or only choice in the past, might not be the best one today.

While broadening the list of choices, new requirements can also be added in the spirit of “skating to where the puck is going”. Don’t plan based upon the past, rather envision what your future will bring. You have the power to ensure your investments today will align with the future of both the market and your data center infrastructure.

Where Is The Puck Going?

The best choice today is storage that is compatible with, and optimized, for where the market is going. The good news is that the marketplace trajectory is becoming more flexible in its deployment options, more capable by including functionality , more open in its development model, all while delivering better value overall to those deploying it.

According to research, analysts recommend that organizations explore the emergence of the “edge storage platform” (ESP). The ESP is where data manipulation and transformation at the edge will create value most quickly. As part of the larger “universal storage platform” (USP) architecture that unites edge, cloud, and core data centers, ESPs are best optimized for certain workloads, use cases, and data service management methods.

These requirements are different from traditional and legacy data center models and must include:

• Flexibility to scale up and down cost-effectively
• Software-defined storage with self-healing technology
• Support for Block, File, Object, and App storage with Kubernetes
• Centralized data management
• Data transfer/transformation optimization

It will be interesting to see how the definition of “storage” evolves over time. One thing is for sure, traditional storage vendors face a significant challenge in meeting these new requirements.

The Elephant in the Room

If I am not paying for it, how can I trust it will not fail? This is a very human reaction. No one has ever lost their job for choosing a top-branded, premium-positioned solution when it inevitably suffers a fault. After all, your data is priceless and the best solutions are always costly, so your storage should be expensive, right?

Mathematically, how can you calculate the currency-equivalent value for reliable storage solution operations if its software is open source and freely distributed at no cost? Your high school math teacher stated that anything divided by zero is undefined; that sounds risky. Perhaps it might be best to take a different perspective when considering value creation for storage.

Same Outcome, Lower Cost

Generic medicines are considered by most (including regulators) to be “as effective” as Big Pharma offerings with the same active ingredients. Packaging, marketing, sales, etc. are very different for a leading brand as they have market position to protect and stakeholders to appease. None of this impacts the efficacy of the medication, but it does affect the sales price.

Just as being free is not a disqualifier for having value, lower-cost open products should not be presumed to be of lower quality by design. Challengers streamline or reduce much of the cost structure to deliver an equivalent product at a lower price point. We are champions of open infrastructure. Read more about how iXsystems passes these savings on to our customers.

Experience it for Yourself

The Open Source model has many advantages in reducing software development costs. It can even bring features to fruition more rapidly as community members assist in the development effort. This is a fundamentally different approach that delivers greater value at lower expense while providing what customers want in their storage solution.

Sounds too good to be true? We encourage you to experience TrueNAS for yourself today (download TrueNAS here), listen to what our customers are saying on Gartner’s Website, or if you’re storing critical data, feel free to schedule a call with one of our helpful Solution Advisors.

Still curious about why we do what we do? Check out this video with some of the faces behind TrueNAS, sharing their perspectives on what it is like for iXians to come to work every day and deliver TrueNAS to the world.

The post Why Traditional Enterprise Storage is So Expensive appeared first on iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers.

At iXsystems, we do not answer to the same Wall Street or Venture Capital stakeholders that other vendors do. This allows us to focus exclusively on making our customers successful, powered by our core value to always “think people before profit”.

The benefits of our Open Source business model are no secret. They are simply unique to iXsystems in the Enterprise Storage market. We leverage open source development, non-traditional tactics, and the energy and engagement of the massive TrueNAS Community to help deliver products rated higher on Gartner than our competition. Collectively, this gives iXsystems an unfair and sustainable advantage in delighting customers while charging less to deliver positive outcomes.

Simply put—our model requires far fewer resources, and we pass those savings on to our customers. We charge less.

How It Works

Compared to iXsystems, traditional data storage vendors are forced to maintain outsized corporate overheads — both in terms of expense and effort — just to keep their technology closed, patented, and to capture 100% of the value they create.

We carry none of that burden, which enables us to be more nimble and efficient. Here’s how that works and how it benefits our customers:

Community – Community is the special ingredient. We are grateful to be stewards of the TrueNAS Open Source project. Consider the unique combination of TrueNAS community and users; iXsystems and partners; customers; and non-paying users. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and contributions from the Community bring enormous value. With iXsystems’ contributions and the incredible Community, this enables agility, investment, and innovation to TrueNAS that no proprietary company could emulate.

Software Development – Plain and simple, making software that is proprietary and closed-source requires more effort, resources, and money than open-source development. Most storage vendors also have multiple code bases, further compounding this disadvantage, while iXsystems has one open-source code base to maintain and grow. This common code base includes many other open-source elements (e.g., OpenZFS), which expands the community of talented Engineers directly contributing to TrueNAS, further reducing costs.

Product Management – Unlike other enterprise storage vendors, iXsystems does not invest in efforts to lock in customers; we do the very opposite by making TrueNAS as open, compatible, interoperable, and easy to leave as possible. However, we believe that once you experience TrueNAS, you won’t want to leave. We don’t have complex software licensing, and our appliances can run the latest software for years, long after the hardware is depreciated — a sustainability practice we fully encourage! At iXsystems, there are zero development cycles spent on planned obsolescence.

Security – TrueNAS is Open Source and therefore transparent by default, with broader user coverage and more eyeballs on the code, thereby leveraging massive user communities to help uncover, alert, and respond to security vulnerabilities. This enables code fixes much faster than proprietary vendors who can only rely on internal resources or respond only after the vulnerability has impacted their customers. Additional security enhancements (e.g. FIPS 140) are available with TrueNAS Enterprise appliances.

Quality – This is another area where the Community makes a huge difference. At a fraction of the investment, Quality Assurance for TrueNAS software takes less time, money, and resources, all while providing more complete test coverage. When a version is declared ready for general use, it has benefitted from extensive community testing. TrueNAS sees faster bug reporting/testing and a more rapid access to new features and fixes than other vendors (who often use their first customer shipments as QA) because of the feedback from the community.

Interoperability – Being open also makes iX a very easy company for other software vendors to partner with, as they need no demo units or non-disclosure agreements to test that their technology works well with TrueNAS.

Documentation – Like Quality, many hands make for light work. By the time a release is recommended for general use, documentation has been reviewed by thousands, accelerating the process of ensuring accuracy.

Intellectual Property – Effort is required to protect technology for maximum profit. iXsystems spends no energy on patents, choosing instead to focus resources on value creation rather than blocking innovation.

Sales – TrueNAS Community Edition software is free to try and use, and has been shown to run on almost any x86 hardware, or can be spun up easily in a VM. As such, we encourage audiences to try it for themselves without any involvement from a sales team. Our experts at iX then help customers identify the optimal configuration of TrueNAS Enterprise appliance(s) for important storage applications.

Marketing – Where our competition spends money on marketing, we instead spend on developing free software that delights our users. Word of mouth is the original marketing tactic and the goodwill we invest in the TrueNAS community results in outsized awareness. With more than 15 million downloads and more than a half million active community members, appreciative users write blogs and how-to content, influencers create videos, and hundreds of thousands of community members tell others about their positive experiences with TrueNAS.

Sustainability – Most storage vendors rely on forced obsolescence to maintain growth. At the end of its supported life, most IT infrastructure is scrapped and not recycled, let alone reused. With TrueNAS software, organizations can repurpose infrastructure beyond its normal life and extract more value from it. After 3-7 years of mission-critical duty, appliances from iXsystems can remain updated with the latest software and transition to a less critical storage role for many years while positively impacting sustainability and financial efficiency.

How This Benefits YOU

“Value” means receiving the most for your dollar. However, most traditional vendors use the word “value” in the context of justifying why it’s worthwhile to pay more for their product. At iX, we don’t have to contort the definition of the word into something it’s not. Our goal in creating TrueNAS was to allow our customers to receive more from our products while also paying less — the true meaning of value as far as we’re concerned.

Experience it for Yourself

We encourage you to experience True Data Freedom for yourself today (download TrueNAS here), see what our customers are saying on Gartner’s Website, or if you’re storing critical data, feel free to schedule a call with one of our helpful Product Experts.

Still curious about why we do what we do? Check out this video with some of the faces behind TrueNAS, sharing their perspectives on what it is like for iXians to come to work every day and deliver TrueNAS to the world.

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Finding the perfect server for your business can be a challenging task but thankfully, iXsystems offers a user-friendly interface that simplifies the process. This blog will walk you through the steps to easily browse iXsystems’ servers.

Searching for Servers:

Start by visiting the iXsystems homepage at www.ixsystems.com. From there, locate the main navigation menu at the top of the page and select “Servers.” Hovering over the option will also allow you to choose from rackmount, high density, and GPU servers. If you want to refine your search to align with your organization’s needs, use the filtering options available on the left-hand side of the page.

Once you find a server that catches your interest, click on its name or image to access the detailed product page. Take your time to review the details provided and when you have questions or want to learn more, our team of experts will be standing by with answers.

Trussworks LLC, a US based construction company, shared their experience with TrueNAS servers. “iXsystems sells servers? I’ve been used to going back and forth with server vendors who push what they want vs. offer what I ask for. iX gave me the right quote at the right price, without the usual vendor games.” – Greg Bilby, IT Manager, Trussworks LLC. You can read more about how Trussworks LLC deploys TrueNAS Enterprise here.

The New NVIDIA H200:

The new NVIDIA H200 is great for use cases that require graphic intensive workloads, deep data analytics, data intensive rendering, or any other use case that needs accelerated workflows. With twice the performance of its previous generation, the NVIDIA H200 is ideal for generative AI, LLM, and provides vast improvements in AI inference performance. Most of the competing vendors out there would bind you to a strict lock-in, but with iXsystems’ servers, you can count on using your NVIDIA H200 however and whenever your organization needs it with a great support team to help in case you ever need it.

We’re Here to Help

iXsystems is an employee-owned and operated, Open Source-centric, customer focused organization, dedicated to providing the highest quality built-to-order enterprise rackmount server solutions, pre-configured servers, and scalable storage appliances to our customers around the globe.

For more information about our servers, contact iXsystems at (408) 943-4100 or visit our website and fill out the inquiry form. One of our expert sales professionals will provide you with a customized quote that best meets your solution needs.

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San Jose, CA, November 14, 2023 – iXsystems^®, the company behind TrueNAS, today announced the general availability of its new performance flagship series of storage appliances, the TrueNAS Enterprise F-Series, along with the latest release of TrueNAS SCALE (23.10) software. These all-NVMe models were designed for maximum performance, reliability, and density to serve the most demanding workloads, while offering significant reductions in power, space, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). With 30TB NVMe drives, a single 2U system supports 720TB of highly-available storage.

TrueNAS F-Series appliances ship with TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10. With the latest generation hardware and software, IT organizations have a new choice to address demanding performance requirements while enjoying the benefits of Open Source economics. The new solution from iXsystems supports data-intensive use cases including AI/ML, containerization , virtualization, content creation/editing, database servers, gaming, and more. This new series has been eagerly awaited by the company’s thousands of global customers in enterprise, government, healthcare, service provider,  media creation, education, research and any organization in need of high-performance storage for their critical data.

TrueNAS F-Series Storage Highlights:

• Two models to choose from: F100 with 30GB/s bandwidth per node and F60 with 20GB/s bandwidth per node
• High-performance: NVMe-powered storage for low latency and bandwidths greater than 20GB/s
• Next-Generation Hardware: Designed to provide unrivaled resilience and drive density
• Superior Scalability: The F-Series easily scales from a few terabytes to 720TB in only 2U, meeting a wide range of user requirements. Both scale-up and scale-out technologies can be used to increase capacity
• High Availability: Dual-controller architecture provides continuous accessibility, preventing data downtime
• Maximum data mobility: The TrueNAS F-Series provides vast connectivity options to maximize interoperability
• Future-Ready Design: Built for modern business applications and the challenges they present

The TrueNAS M-Series remains the versatile and high-capacity system for hybrid, flash, and HDD requirements in the portfolio. The M-Series and F-Series systems both run the same TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10 software with compatible features and a common WebUI.

“Support for demanding workloads is the top reason organizations are looking for NVMe storage, and part of choosing NVMe is to future-proof their environment,” said Dave Raffo, Senior Analyst at The Futurum Group. “With high-performance appliances at a fraction of the
price of many NVMe systems, TrueNAS Enterprise is an increasingly interesting choice for
organizations to consider.”

TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10 is available across the iXsystems appliance portfolio, offering storage, compute, and container solutions for a flexible feature-rich storage environment. The Linux-based platform uniquely offers KVM virtualization, native container support, Kubernetes integration, and the ability to scale up to 1,200 drives and 25PB+ in a single system. The highly-evolved TrueNAS data platform emphasizes scalability and high-availability, boasting a scale-up or scale-out architecture built on the robust OpenZFS 2.2 filesystem. This ensures top-notch data integrity and advanced storage features to meet the most data-intensive business needs.

Highlights of TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10 include:

• Upgraded to OpenZFS 2.2 with multiple iXsystems contributions
• Upgraded to Linux Kernel 6.1 with improved hardware support
• Improved application UI
• Enhanced storage pool UI
• ZFS Block Cloning (Deduplication) for SMB and NFS file copies
• ZFS dRAID Pool Layouts

“The unveiling of TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10 and the TrueNAS F-Series Storage line emphasizes our relentless drive to offer leading-edge, open-source storage solutions,” said Morgan Littlewood, Senior Vice President of Product Management for iXsystems. “We are excited about the value these solutions will bring to users as they support the industry’s most demanding Media and Entertainment (M&E) and IT workloads.”

Availability

Both TrueNAS Enterprise F-series appliances and TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 are now available for users and enterprises to explore. TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 is free to download and TrueNAS F-Series pricing varies based on the configuration of each system.

For more information on TrueNAS F-Series or our other products, please contact iX.

About iXsystems and TrueNAS

iX is an Open Source pioneer and the company behind TrueNAS, the world’s most deployed storage software. Relied upon by millions in all 195 countries, TrueNAS is an award-winning universal data platform used by a majority of Fortune 500^TM companies. The platform harnesses the power of the legendary ZFS file system to provide scale-up or scale-out unified storage with the reliability and performance demanded by virtualization, backup, and many other data-heavy workloads. As an alternative to legacy storage systems that are proprietary, restrictive, and often overpriced, TrueNAS helps organizations modernize how they store and protect data by leveraging open storage to simplify operations and drastically reduce cost.

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