McGill University in Canada Selecting Three iXsystems TrueNAS

iXsystems, Inc. announced that McGill University’s School of Computer Science has deployed TrueNAS in its various computing environments across the campus.

The school has deployed multiple storage arrays to thousands of students, researchers and teachers. They use TrueNAS to share files over NFS, CIFS, and AFP.

McGill’s School of Computer Science runs almost exclusively on open source software. When it was looking for a replacement for their existing storage solution, they were aware that iXsystems develops FreeNAS, which is open source and a widely used software-defined storage (SDS).

They discovered that iXsystems offers TrueNAS, an enterprise-supported storage appliance based on FreeNAS. TrueNAS utilizes the ZFS self-healing file system, maximizing storage capacity using its data compression as well as preventing data corruption, while offering the redundancy and HA needed for McGill’s mission-critical deployment.

“We selected iXsystems because of the robustness of the TrueNAS appliance platform as well as iXsystems’ commitment to open source. TrueNAS offered the best bang for the buck by a long shot, with 2.5x the amount of storage for the same dollar. We also liked the fact that iXsystems has direct access to FreeBSD developers, and its support team has been incredible in terms of hardware replacement, support, and onsite visits,” says Ron Simpson, McGill IT department.

McGill has three storage appliances from iXsystems with the largest of these having over 1PB of raw storage. It selected TrueNAS over storage solutions from numerous competitors.

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