iXsystems Introduces TrueNAS Enterprise F-Series All-NVMe Appliances and TrueNAS SCALE 23.10

by Frank Morrison November 15, 2023

written by Frank Morrison November 15, 2023

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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Frank Morrison

Head perpetually in the clouds. After spending 14 years in the military, he dove straight into the deep end of IT Engineering. Since then, he has worked at banks, MSP's, and in various contractor teams. He is fascinated by the advancement of cloud technologies and is here to help guide you through the rapidly changing environments and all the latest players entering the field.