iXsystems: TrueNAS M40/50 Unified Storage Line

iXsystems Inc. announced the TrueNAS M40 and M50 as its new high-performance models in its hybrid, unified storage product line.

The TrueNAS M-Series harnesses NVMe and NVDIMM to bring all-flash array performance to the TrueNAS hybrid arrays. It also includes the Intel Xeon Scalable Family of Processors and supports up to 100GbE and 32Gb FC networking.

Sitting between the all-flash TrueNAS Z50 and the hybrid TrueNAS X-Series in the product line, the TrueNAS M- Series delivers up to 10PB of highly-available and flash-powered NAS and rounds out a product set that has a capacity and performance option for many storage budgets.

Designed for On-Premises and Enterprise Cloud Environments
As a unified file, block, and object sharing solution, TrueNAS can meet the needs of file serving, backup, virtualization, media production, and private cloud users thanks to its support for the SMB, NFS, AFP, iSCSI, FC, and S3 protocols.

At the heart of the TrueNAS M-Series is a custom 4U, dual-controller head unit that supports up to 24 3.5″ drives and comes in two models, the M40 and M50, for flexibility and scalability. The M40 uses NVDIMMs for write cache, SSDs for read cache, and up to two external 60-bay expansion shelves that unlock up to 2PB in capacity. The TM50 uses NVDIMMs for write caching, NVMe drives for read caching, and up to twelve external 60-bay expansion shelves to scale upwards of 10PB. The dual-controller design provides high-availability failover and non-disruptive upgrades for mission-critical enterprise environments.

By design, the M-Series unleashes cutting-edge persistent memory technology for demanding performance and capacity workloads, enabling businesses to accelerate enterprise applications and deploy enterprise private clouds that are twice the capacity of previous TrueNAS models. It also supports replication to the Amazon S3, BackBlaze B2, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms and can deliver an object store using the S3 object storage protocol at a fraction of the cost of the public cloud.

Fast
As an enterprise storage platform, the M50 supports demanding performance workloads with up to four active 100GbE ports, 3TB of RAM, 32GB of NVDIMM write cache and up to 15TB of NVMe flash read cache. The M40 and M50 include up to 24/7 and global next-business-day support, putting IT at ease. The modular and tool-less design of the M-Series allows for easy, non-disruptive servicing and upgrading by end-users and support technicians for guaranteed uptime. TrueNAS has US-based support provided by the engineering team that developed it, offering the response that enterprise needs.

TrueNAS Features:

Enterprise: Suited for private clouds and enterprise workloads such as file sharing, backups, M&E, surveillance, and hosting virtual machines.
Unified: Utilizes SMB, AFP, NFS for file storage, iSCSI, FC and OpenStack Cinder for block storage, and S3-compatible APIs for object storage. Supports every common operating system, hypervisor, and application.
Economical: Deploy an enterprise private cloud and reduce storage TCO by 70% over AWS with built-in enterprise-class features such as in-line compression, deduplication, clones, and thin-provisioning.
Safe: The OpenZFS file system ensures data integrity with replication and snapshots. Customers can replicate data to the rest of the iXsystems storage lineup and to the public cloud.
Reliable: High availability option with dual hot-swappable controllers for continuous data availability and 99.999% uptime.
Familiar: Provision and manage storage with the same WebUI and REST APIs used in all iXsystems storage products, as well as iXsystems’ FreeNAS software.
Certified: TrueNAS has passed the Citrix Ready, VMware Ready, and Veeam Ready certifications, reducing the risk of deploying a virtualized infrastructure.
Open: By using industry-standard sharing protocols, the OpenZFS open source enterprise file system and FreeNAS, an open source storage OS (and also engineered by iXsystems), TrueNAS is the most open enterprise storage solution on the market.

The NAS M40 and M50 will be available in April 2018 through the iXsystems channel partner network.

The M-Series starts at under $20,000 and can be expanded using a linear ‘per terabyte’ pricing model. With typical compression, a petabyte can be stored for under $100,000.

TrueNAS comes with a software suite that provides NFS, Windows SMB, iSCSI, snapshots, clones and replication.

Tony Palmer, Senior Validation Analyst, ESG, comments: “ESG research reveals that the most important factor driving consideration or deployment of solid state storage is improved performance, which is not a surprise, but reliability, cost per I/O, and TCO are also important factors. This emphasis on multiple criteria tells us that systems incorporating solid state storage are now seen as genuine mainstream storage systems, and not just performance enhancers. That speaks to the maturity of flash and it’s why the features, TCO, and availability offered by iXsystems’ M-Series matters. ESG Labs is performing hands-on testing of the TrueNAS M-Series hybrid storage solution with a focus on performance and availability to validate the business benefits provided by the TrueNAS M50 for M&E streaming, backup and restore, VMware hosting, and file sharing.”

Scott Pegg, CIO, Gladstone Institutes, affiliated with UCSF, said:” Our use of HPC for genomics and imaging comes with a unique set of requirements that does not fit into standard clouds, so we were very excited to hear about the new TrueNAS M-Series, and iXsystems’ strategy to focus on private clouds. We plan to add the TrueNAS M-Series to our HPC infrastructure to supplement prior-generation models of TrueNAS. We expect that adding the TrueNAS M-Series will improve our ability to analyze our HPC genomic data and deliver critical insights to the life sciences community.”

Brett Davis, EVP, iXsystems, added: “Four years ago we launched an enterprise storage array based on Open Source that disrupted the industry. Today, these models have grown into the iXsystems TrueNAS M40 and M50. Customers can use the M-Series for data analytics, M&E editing and streaming, backups, virtualized environments, video surveillance, office file sharing, and other mission-critical applications. The TrueNAS M Series enables customers to eliminate their dependence on public clouds with an enterprise private cloud and dramatically lower their storage TCO. TrueNAS provides enterprise-grade features that have the same functionality as AVID ISIS and Nexis, Dell EMC VNXe and Unity, HPE MSA 2040, the NetApp FAS2600 series, and other enterprise storage products at a far lower price point, allowing customers to benefit from open source economics.”