NAS storage: TrueNAS aims to make it big in Europe
Aimed at the SME market, but with NAS systems that go to tens of petabytes, iXsystems brings dual controllers, NVMe and hybrid flash, AI-capable storage, and container support
Small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and entry-level NAS maker iXsystems is less well-known this side of the Atlantic, but aims at getting more customers here than in the US.
“Europe is clearly the region where our systems are being deployed more quickly,” said iXsystems director Brett Davis, speaking during a recent IT Press Tour event in Silicon Valley. “That’s because Europe is more advanced in terms of adopting open source solutions, and that’s more often the case in data storage.”
iXsystems’ TrueNAS operating system has been downloaded more than 500,000 times, and is freely installable on any server hardware. It’s based on OpenZFS and is a file system with the same functionality you’d find in much more expensive NAS systems.
“The success of the community version of TrueNAS is remarkable,” said Davis. “It popularises our software among organisations that go on to buy our arrays, in which everything is already integrated and which are much less costly than those of our competitors. And, the version of TrueNAS that comes on our hardware can protect against ransomware.”
Early in the year, iXsystems launched a 2U array, the TrueNAS H30, which has high availability fault tolerance, can go to 720TB of capacity, and has the Fangtooth version 25.04 of its OS.
Fangtooth: iXsystems’ new OS
Fangtooth won’t be officially deployed in iXsystems’ machines until April 2025, but a beta version is currently downloadable. Improvements include support for RoCE (RDMA over converged Ethernet), which allows direct access to memory over the network via NFS file protocol and iSCSI block access.
“Firstly, it’s about bringing simple, faster file shares,” said Davis. “That said, the key advantage of a RoCE connection is to allow for the GPU direct protocol between the storage and an AI [artificial intelligence] server with an Nvidia GPU on board. That functionality is on our roadmap but will arrive later.”
Fangtooth also has rapid data deduplication, external redundancy to Fibre Channel disk shelves, support for containerised applications, and cloning of virtual machine data for VMware and Veeam.
“Storage for Veeam backups and for VMware virtual machines are a big driver for our sales,” said Davis. “It’s in these two areas that we offer our latest features. So, we offer copies of stored data accessible by SMB for Veeam and block mode for VMware, without taking more capacity or creating excess network traffic. We use pointers to the source data, and from the point of view of the user operations are 10x quicker than previously.”
With regard to running containerised applications, such as backup and data management tools, it actually comes from functionality that has existed for some time via TrueNAS’s use of FreeBSD and its Jails containers.
That FreeBSD version, called TrueNAS Core, was downloadable up to the end of last year, but it has coexisted since 2022, with an alternative version of TrueNAS Scale based on Debian Linux, which didn’t offer containers. iXsystems then decided to only maintain TrueNAS Scale from now on, and has built in the LXC Linux kernel container system.
Four families of arrays, from 2.5PB to 25PB
The H30 – with high availability – ushers in a new generation of arrays with dual controllers, and can support spinning disk HDDs as well as NVMe flash. The two controllers don’t share the load, however. The second is just for emergency failover.
“According to our tests, making the two controllers work at the same time doesn’t bring high availability,” said Davis. “Here, the reliability of the system rests on the fact that we use SSDs via two NVMe ports, with each connected to a controller.”
Each controller has 20 Xeon CPU cores, 256GB of RAM, throughput of 8GBps via eight 10Gbps Ethernet ports, four 25Gbps Ethernet ports and a single 100Gbps connection to a maximum of two external disk shelves. The base unit can take 12 drives, with those being QLC drives of 60TB or HDDs of 24TB. With the two external shelves, capacity can get up to 2.5PB.
TrueNAS arrays come in five families. The F series is aimed at high performance, and looks like the H series but actually shares input/output between the two controllers, but not allowing high availability. You can extend F series arrays to six external shelves and maximum capacity of 10PB, all on NVMe capacity and 100Gbps connectivity.
The M series aims at capacity, in 4U arrays with dual controllers and 16 HDDs or SSDs, and can extend to 25PB in 12 shelves externally.
There’s also a single-controller R series that can be HDD, NVMe or hybrid, and can go to about 5PB. Also, there is the Mini series desktop NAS in mini tower format with four HDDs and a 10Gbps connection.
“Our ambition is to be able to offer arrays that get to 100PB,” said Davis. “We have two projects with that in mind. One includes working in clusters with a large number of controllers. The other is for more powerful controllers that support more drives.”
