iXsystems Unveils New TrueNAS M-Series Unified Storage Line

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 10, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @iXsystems, the leader in Enterprise #OpenSource servers and #softwaredefined storage (#SDS), announced the #TrueNAS M40 and M50 as the newest 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 award-winning TrueNAS hybrid arrays. It also includes the Intel® Xeon® Scalable Family of Processors and supports up to 100GbE and 32Gb Fibre Channel 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 10 Petabytes of highly-available and flash-powered network attached storage and rounds out a comprehensive product set that has a capacity and performance option for every storage budget. Designed for On-Premises & 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, Fibre Channel, 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 maximum flexibility and scalability. The TrueNAS 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 TrueNAS M50 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 TrueNAS 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 ubiquitous S3 object storage protocol at a fraction of the cost of the public cloud. Fast As a true enterprise storage platform, the TrueNAS M50 supports very 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 TrueNAS 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 rapid response that every enterprise needs. Award-Winning TrueNAS Features Enterprise: Perfectly 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, Fibre Channel 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 best-in-class replication and snapshotting. 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 simple and powerful 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, the world’s #1 Open Source storage operating system (and also engineered by iXsystems), TrueNAS is the most open enterprise storage solution on the market. Availability The TrueNAS M40 and M50 will be generally available in April 2018 through the iXsystems global channel partner network. The TrueNAS M-Series starts at under $20,000 USD and can be easily expanded using a linear "per terabyte" pricing model. With typical compression, a Petabyte can be stored for under $100,000 USD. TrueNAS comes with an all-inclusive software suite that provides NFS, Windows SMB, iSCSI, snapshots, clones and replication.

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/04/10/1467698/0/en/iXsystems-Unveils-New-TrueNAS-M-Series-Unified-Storage-Line.html

Leadership Is The Secret To An Open Source Business Model

There is a good chance you’ve never heard of open source software and an even greater one that you’re using it every day without even realizing it. Open source software is computer software that is available under a variety of licenses that all encourage the sharing of the software and its underlying source code. Open source has powered the internet from day one and today powers the cloud and just about everything connected to it from your mobile phone to virtually every internet of things device.

#FreeNAS is one of two open source operating systems that my company, @iXsystems, develops and distributes free of charge and is at the heart of our line of #TrueNAS enterprise storage products. While some of our competitors sell storage software similar to FreeNAS, we not only give it away but also do so with truly no strings attached -- competitors can and do take FreeNAS and build products based on it with zero obligation to share their changes. The freedom to do so is the fundamental tenet of permissively licensed open source software, and while it sounds self-defeating to be this generous, we’ve proven that leadership, not licensing, is the true secret to a successful open source business model.

We each have our own personal definition of what is fair when it comes to open source. At iXsystems, we made a conscious decision to base FreeNAS and TrueOS on the FreeBSD operating system developed by the FreeBSD project. We stand on the shoulders of giants by using FreeBSD and we consider it quite reasonable to give back on the same generous terms that the FreeBSD project offers us. We could be selective in what we provide free of charge, but we believe that doing so would be short-sighted. In the long game we’re playing, the leadership we provide over the open source projects we produce is infinitely more important than any restrictions provided by the licenses of those and other open source projects. In the face of this “legal piracy,” our secret to staying several steps ahead of the competition is to continuously innovate our “free” software and be the go-to source of information about it and the hardware to run it on. Our software runs on just about any personal computer, but the right hardware is critical to delivering quality, reliable data storage.

Twenty years in, we have no reason to change our free-software-on-great-hardware business model and giving away the software has brought an unexpected side-benefit: the largest Q/A department in the world, staffed by our passionate users who volunteer to let us know every thought they have about our software. We wouldn’t change a thing, and I encourage you to find exactly what win-win goodwill you and your company can provide to your constituents to make them not just a customer base but a community.

Here are some tips to use if you want to win the long game in computing:

Drive The Conversation

It took a leap of faith for us to give away the heart of our products in exchange for a passionate community, but doing so changes your customer's relationship with your brand from priced to priceless. This kind of relationship leverages a social contract instead of a legal one. Taking this approach empowers your users in ways they will not experience with other companies and it is your responsibility to lead, rather than control them with a project like FreeNAS. Taking this approach requires mutual trust, but that trust is invaluable once earned. You will invariably slip up from time to time but if you handle it correctly, the trust only grows stronger.

Relieve Customer Pain Points With Every New Release

Responsiveness to the needs of your constituents is what distinguishes project leadership from project dictatorship. Be sure to balance your vision for your products and projects with the “real world” needs of your users. While our competition can use the software we develop, they will at best wow users with specific features rather than project-wide ones. Never underestimate how grateful a user will be when you make their job easier.

Accept That A Patent Is Not A Business Model

Patents are considered the ultimate control mechanism in the technology industry, but they only provide a business model if you have a monopoly and monopolies are illegal. Resist getting hung up on the control you can establish over your customers and spend your time acquiring and empowering them. The moment you both realize that your success is mutual, you have a relationship that will last longer than any single sale. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how the relationships you build will transcend the specific companies that friends you make work for.

Distinguish Leadership From Management

Every company has various levels of management, but leadership is the magic that creates markets where they did not exist and aligns paying customers with value that you can deliver in a profitable manner. Leadership and vision are ultimately the most proprietary aspects of a technology business, over every patentable piece of hardware or licensable piece of software. Whether you create a new market or bring efficiency to an existing one, your leadership is your secret weapon -- not your level of control.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/02/leadership-is-the-secret-to-an-open-source-business-model/#32a3abc665c7

Singularity Containers for HPC & Deep Learning

#Containerization as a concept of isolating application processes while sharing the same operating system (OS) kernel has been around since the beginning of this century. It started its journey from as early as Jails from the @FreeBSD era. Jails heavily leveraged the chroot environment but expanded capabilities to include a virtualized path to other system attributes such as storage, interconnects and users. #SolarisZones and #AIX Workload Partitions also fall into a similar category. Since then, the advent and advancement in technologies such as cgroups, systemd and user-namespaces greatly improved the security and isolation of containers when compared to their initial implementations. The next step was to abstract the complexity involved in containerization by adding user-friendly features such as templates, libraries and language bindings. LXC, an OS container meant to run multiple services, accomplished this task. In the late 2000s, @Docker, an application container that was meant to run a single service, took it one step further by creating an entire ecosystem of developer tools and registries for container images, improving the user experience of containers and making containerization technology accessible to novice Linux users. This led to widespread adoption. The evolving nature of this domain led to the creation of a standardization process called Open Container Initiative in 2015. Containerization drastically improves the “time to results” metric of many applications by eliminating several roadblocks in the path to production. These roadblocks arise from issues pertaining to portability, reproducibility, dependency hell, isolation, configurability and security. For example, applications in fast-paced growth areas, such as high performance computing (HPC) which include verticals and workloads like molecular dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, MIMD Lattice Computation codes, life sciences and deep learning (DL), are very complicated to build and run optimally, due to very frequent updates to the application codes, its dependencies and supporting libraries. Container images include the applications themselves and their development environments, which aids developers in porting their applications from their desktops to datacenters. This also helps with version control, making it easier to understand which versions of the software package and dependencies lead to a particular result. This, in turn, helps to manage dependency hell, which refers to the entire application failing if one of its dependencies fails. Another real-world example is collaboration between researchers, where containers help with reproducibility of the results. In short, instead of spending time debugging the software environment, researchers can focus on the science. Containers are orders of magnitude faster to spin up than virtual machines (VM) since they do not have a hypervisor providing a virtual hardware layer and a guest OS on top of the host OS as an independent entity. For a majority of HPC and DL applications, an un-tuned full VM may experience performance degradation when compared to bare metal. The overhead and performance degradation of a container when compared to an equivalent fully subscribed bare metal workload performance is nonexistent. All of these features have promoted the deep proliferation of container technologies.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/03/19/singularity-containers-for-hpc-deep-learning/

iXsystems: 'weird' but profitable NAS vendor

Here’s something you rarely hear from high tech companies today: “We’re a hardware company in our heart and soul.” That is how executive vice president Brett Davis introduced iXsystems during a press tour in early December at the NAS vendor’s San Jose, California headquarters. The company sells open-source based TrueNAS enterprise hardware and FreeNAS desktop systems.

Self-identifying as a hardware company in this software-defined world is only one reason why iXsystems seems out of place in Silicon Valley. The vendor also bootstrapped its financing, turning a profit without accepting outside investment.

“We’re private, profitable and self-funded,” Davis said. “Our heritage goes back to the ‘90s. We’ve just been here. We say we’re unique, but you can say we’re weird.”

But it’s the hardware tag that provides most of the weirdness these days. The iXsystems headquarters includes a manufacturing facility in the back, where Davis said the 130-person company can fulfill 3,000 orders in a day.

The vendor claims more than 4,000 customers, including Sony, NBC, Duke University and NASA.

But the iXsystems strategy of bundling open-source storage software on commodity hardware isn’t that unusual.  Plenty of others do that, and label it software-defined storage. But only iXsytems boasts it’s a hardware company even if its value comes from open-source projects.

The company’s roots date to Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi), which started in 1991. iXsystems founders founders Mike Lauth and Matt Olander acquired the hardware business from BSDi in 2002. Lauth has been the CEO and Olander the CTO since then. From the start, iXsystems was heavily involved in the FreeBSD project and is the project leader for FreeNAS Storage and TrueOS Desktop open-source operating systems.

Davis said 70% of @iXsystems appliances are custom configurations. The vendor uses @Intel, @AMD and #ARM chips inside. The systems support @VMware, @Microsoft #HyperV, #Citrix, @KVM and @OpenStack #virtualization software, #Hadoop, @Docker and #MySQL data and container platforms, and @FreeNAS, @FreeBSD, @CentOS, @RedHat @Linux and  @Ubuntu #opensource software.

“We’ve been doing open source since way before it was cool,” Davis said. “We give away the number one software-defined storage (FreeNAS), but software and hardware are inseparable.”

iXsystems re-sold storage systems from Dot Hill, Infortrend and others in the late 2000s, but had to rely on those vendors for support. Now iXsystems provides end-to-end support for its storage. The company acquired the FreeNAS project in late 2009, and then spent two years re-writing the operating system before making it commercially available. iXsystems ported the OpenZFS open-source enterprise file system to FreeNAS. That gave FreeNAS file, block and object support, triple parity RAID, support for flash and unlimited instant snapshots.

@FreeNAS is file-only storage while @TrueNAS is unified storage with #FibreChannel networking support. TrueNAS competes with the likes of @DellEMC #VNXe and #Unity, @NetApp #FAS, @Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s #MSA2040 and @Nimble arrays, and @Western Digital’s @Tegile platform.

A more souped-up @iXsystems platform is planned for March with #NVMe support, but the vendor is staying quietly publicly about that for now.

Davis said iXsystems is staying out of hyper-convergence, even though it has all the pieces – including FreeBSD’s open-source bhyve hypervisor.

“We can run virtual machines and containers in FreeNAS,” he said. “We have the capabilities to do it, and we have our own hypervisor. But it’s a competitive space, and we have other plans.”

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/blog/Storage-Soup/iXsystems-weird-but-profitable-NAS-vendor

BSDTW ’17 Conference Recap

After 13 years, Taiwan is back in the BSD Conference spotlight. On November 11th and 12th, representatives from #iXsystems and more than 100 BSD developers, users, enthusiasts, and academic professionals from around the world came to Taiwan to participate in the 2017 BSDTW event, held at the Beitou Resort in Taiwan to discuss BSD. Co-hosted by the Open Culture Foundation (OCF) and Skymizer, the two-day conference was jam-packed with multiple presentations covering BSD technologies and projects. It was billed by the organizers as a venue “to exchange knowledge about the BSD operating systems, facilitate coordination and cooperation among users and developers, and to promote business-friendly BSD-licensed open source software.”    At the start of the event, the organizers of BSDTW reported that attendance had exceeded their expectations and that all tickets were sold out. During this time, they also took the opportunity to thank the staff and sponsors of BSDTW. #iXsystems was both excited and proud to be a sponsoring company for this event. Other sponsors included @Microsoft and @Oath, a subsidiary of @Verizon.   On the first day, the presentations by Johannes M. Dieterich on #HighPerformanceComputing ( #HPC) and #GPU acceleration, Peter Grehan on Graphics Support in #bhyve, and Allan Jude on #ZFS Advanced Integration were particularly interesting and thoughtful. Johannes gave an amazing overview on high performance computing, computer languages used, and @FreeBSD’s involvement in that realm. We learned that #FreeBSD needs a lot of work to compete in an HPC playing field that is currently dominated by @Linux. Johannes also discussed how he is using FreeBSD to develop software for HPC and what else is required to drive more FreeBSD deployments in HPC environments. Peter Grehan’s topic is something that we at iXsystems can relate to as we have been doing a lot of work around bhyve. Peter reviewed the history of graphics support in bhyve and the plans to add FreeRDP and spice support.   After an inspiring first day, we gathered for a banquet dinner at the La Villa Danshui restaurant in the Tamsui District. Located in Northern Taiwan, Tamsui is a charming seaside town and a popular destination for tourists. Also, renowned as a place to view sunsets, it gave everyone the perfect opportunity to relax, unwind, and reflect on what we learned that day. The following day, OpenBSD founder, Theo de Raadt and FreeBSD developer Ruslan Bukin gave presentations that were particularly interesting. Theo gave a talk about mitigations and other real security features and explained how attackers can discover bugs in your software and what mechanisms one could use to prevent that from happening.                                                                                                                             Ruslan discussed his efforts to port FreeBSD to the RISC-V platform. He talked about the work needed to ‘make the system boot’ and then ‘be able to launch/run in a shell’. It was a remarkable project. His talk left quite an impression on us, especially this quote: “It is not common that a new computer architecture appears. It takes years. I worked very hard day and night so as to not lose this opportunity.”   For many of us, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the conference was to meet and catch up with friends and acquaintances. We are looking forward to the event next year!

https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/bsdtw17-recap/