In the last five years or so, there have been massive strides and advancements in Enterprise Data Storage and Delivery systems. One advancement that has taken the computing world by storm is All-NVMe Flash storage. The technology has finally advanced to a point where it is both technologically feasible and financially reasonable to upgrade those old boxes full of spinning rust to all-new, faster, more efficient, more effective storage solutions.
In the last five years or so, there have been massive strides and advancements in Enterprise Data Storage and Delivery systems. One advancement that has taken the computing world by storm is All-NVMe Flash storage. The technology has finally advanced to a point where it is both technologically feasible and financially reasonable to upgrade those old boxes full of spinning rust to all-new, faster, more efficient, more effective storage solutions.
Enter iXsystems, the minds behind the massively popular and (more importantly) open-source Network Attached Storage (NAS) platform software TrueNAS, have entered the game with their champion: The TrueNAS Enterprise F-Series.
F-Series
These all-NVMe models have been designed from the ground up for maximum performance, reliability, and density to serve the most demanding workloads.
The Performance Flagship workhorse of this new product line is the F100, capable of holding individual 30TB NVMe drives. A single 2U system can carry up to 720TB of highly available storage.
It touts:
- 6 x 100GbE
- 24 NVMe SSDs in 2U
- 512GB RAM
- 48 Cores
However, the most important feature for many enterprise customers is the Dual Controllers for High-Availability ZFS.
- Dual-ported NVMe Gen4 SSDs
- Over Five 9’s Availability with <20s Failover time
- Full ZFS capabilities – Copy-on-Write, Snapshot, RAID-Z
All F-Series devices come pre-loaded with TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10, codenamed Cobia.
TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10 – Cobia
When installed on the F100, TrueNAS Enterprise uniquely offers native container support, Kubernetes integration for containerized applications, and the ability to scale up to 1,200 drives and 25PB+ in a single system.
Some specific features of the latest release:
- Upgraded to OpenZFS 2.2 with multiple iXsystems contributions
- Upgraded to Linux Kernel 6.1 with improved hardware support
- NVIDIA 535.54.03 driver updates
- Improved application UI
- Enhanced storage pool UI
- ZFS Block Cloning (Deduplication) for SMB and NFS file copies
- ZFS dRAID Pool Layouts
dRAID Pool
One of the more impressive features released in TrueNAS 23.10 is the RAID system proprietary to iXsystems known as dRAID. This system is unique in how it spreads the data as a secure parity. One way is rather than having one entire drive for spare; it uses all drives for sparing in a fully populated system.
Most impressive is that this form of data surety reduces disk rebuild and resilver times by almost 80 percent! Additionally, it uses significantly fewer resources, causing less performance impact during the resilvering process.
Availability
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.
iXsystems
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