Enterprise-Class Storage Does Not Have to Bust the Budget

Enterprise-Class Storage Does Not Have to Bust the Budget

Enterprise-Class Storage Does Not Have to Bust the Budget

    Info growth continues to increase the speed of, straining storage infrastructures and pressing organizations to find ways to control safe-keeping costs. Small to middle size businesses (SMBs) often try to spend less with the use of consumer-grade safe-keeping, but that is a risky strategy. Although it will certainly lower costs in the near term, it creates the real likelihood of increased operating and downtime costs down the road.

Simply put, consumer-grade technology is built for consumer-grade workloads. For example, consumer-grade hard drives are generally designed to handle an gross annual workload limit of about 25TB per 12 months - much less than the 500TB twelve-monthly limit for most enterprise-grade drives. Not surprisingly, failure rates skyrocket when consumer-grade drives are blocked into arrays and afflicted by data center workloads.

An additional big difference is the always-on nature of the business environment. Data middle storage arrays are power up on a regular basis and are rarely idle for just about any span of time. When they aren't supporting application desires or data saves, they are often involved in error detection, system back up and other maintenance duties - all of which places additional stress on mechanical components. Consumer-grade devices just weren't intended for that type of frequent activity.

In hybrid arrays that incorporate traditional hard turns with flash-based solid-state turns (SSDs), it has become fairly common to use consumer-grade SSDs as a cost-control method. The theory is the fact since flash drives are electric without the mechanical restrictions of hard drives, they is designed for the extra work load. There are multiple tradeoffs, however.

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The life span of a flash drive is measured by the number of write or erase cycles usually it takes before becoming unstable. Consumer turns built for light activity lack the toughness of enterprise-class SSDs and can wear out more than ten-times faster. Enterprise SOLID STATE DRIVE offers significantly faster data transfer rates with multi-Gigabit-per-second throughput in comparison to about 2500Mbps for top-of-the-line consumer products.

Consumer-grade storage may provide plug-and-play simplicity, but with none of the scalability, capacity or optimization features of a business-grade solution. However, many SMBs often feel as if they have no choice due to the upfront costs of enterprise-grade storage.

iXsystems is removing that barrier with its line of TrueNAS storage appliances made for smaller organizations that need reliable, enterprise-class storage. Based on the FreeNAS open-source software-defined storage system, the TrueNAS X10 is an single storage array that offers 20TB of hybrid record and block storage for under $10, 000.

TrueNAS X10 arrays consist of enterprise-grade capabilities, including VMware, Citrix and Veeam certifications, incorporation with public clouds, capacity-efficient features such as block-level inline compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning, as well as snapshots, replication and data-at-rest encryption.

TrueNAS X10 is available in a single-controller or a dual-controller configuration. iXsystems recommends the dual-controller configuration for customers requiring high availability, but notes those with budget constraints may opt for the single-controller version in the beginning and then upgrade to a dual-configuration at a later point. Each safe-keeping controller is anchored with a high-performance, systems-on-a-chip (SOC) Intel Xeon D-1531 cpu.

Even though it is important to limit costs and conserve cash when possible, you need reliable technology to drive business efficiency. With data growth accelerating at a rapid pace, using consumer-grade solutions to address your storage needs is a big gamble that could cause recovery time, data loss and other operational issues.