iXsystems TrueNAS Open Source Storage
Channel: Charbax
Date: 2021-09-15

Live with Morgan Littlewood, SVP, Product Management and Business Development at https://www.ixsystems.com to introduce the company, talk about the advantages of Open Source storage and a few of its popular products, they are the makers of FreeNAS now rebranded TrueNAS Core, the world's leading free open source NAS system on x86.

In this video, Morgan Littlewood, the SVP of Products at iX Systems, introduces the company's world-leading open-source platform for Network Attached Storage (NAS) called TrueNAS. The company has been developing this software for almost 14 years and has built a community of 250,000 people, making it the number one open-source NAS product in the market. IX Systems is also providing commercial offerings based on TrueNAS. TrueNAS Core is the open-source product, while TrueNAS Enterprise is the commercial product, which focuses on value-added features such as high availability, enclosure management, and security capabilities. IX Systems sells its own hardware for its commercial offerings. Although there are other companies like QNAP and Synology, they build their hardware and software separately and do not use IX Systems' open-source platform. The company is currently focusing on making sure that its software works well with Intel and AMD platforms, but it plans to work with ARM technology in the future. However, reliable NAS systems need ECC memory, which is currently only available on good Intel and AMD platforms.

This video discusses Open ZFS, a file system that was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, and was later acquired by Oracle who open-sourced it in the early to mid-2000s. The speaker explains how they adopted it and helped integrate it into FreeNAS, which is now TrueNAS, and how they continue to develop it with the OpenZFS organization. OpenZFS is a very flexible and reliable file system with a scrubbing capability to ensure data is always updated, and corrections are made automatically without losing any valuable data. The speaker also explains how their business involves optimizing hardware to make sure that performance is very good and providing a turnkey system for enterprises to use. Finally, they talk about the importance of scale-out for more capacity and performance, which tends to be the case if you want lots of bandwidth.

In this YouTube video, the Trina's M Series storage system is discussed. It has one and a half terabytes of RAM and uses NV-DIMMs, which are non-volatile memory modules that utilize special technology for accelerating reads. Up to 12 of the expansion shelves can be connected to one head unit, and the expansion shelves are getting larger. The largest run shelf has 102 drives, 18 terabytes each. One can effectively get almost two petabytes of data in one shelf, and 12 of these shelves can be added to a system to build a very big system. The focus of the Trina's M Series is on making everything very reliable, and they have achieved five nines reliability on their systems. Their goal is to help customers handle the problem that their data is growing faster than their budgets. Open source technology is a key technology for making sure that customers can deliver that storage more economically. The Trina's M Series storage system is the fastest CFS storage system, and it is commonly used for virtualization, backup, media entertainment, academic and research purposes, and many other different use cases. The system is versatile and can support different requirements without having to change the storage operating system and system every time a new application is added. Two different models of deployment are possible: building a very big system with multiple connections or having a smaller system in every department and a central backup system to back up all the data.

This video discusses the affordability of tapes compared to hard drives and the challenges of making solid-state drives (SSDs) more cost-effective. The speaker explains a new capability for the M-Series model, introduced in 2021, which offers an upgradeable path and scalability. With this system, users can start with a small configuration and scale up to a maximum of 20 petabytes of capacity in a single system. The speaker also discusses the Trinity Scale, which allows customers to grow the number of racks they have to keep on expanding their capacity. The technology used can handle up to 100 systems in one cluster with a maximum of 2x byte of capacity, which is in the hundreds of petabytes range. The speaker also talks about the smart storage system that YouTube uses to distribute their videos, which includes a reasonable-sized cache system and a massive video repository. (chatgpt generated previous 4 paragraphs of description text based on the automated subtitle file)