iX accelerates on TrueNAS Scale and TrueCommand

iX, a leader in open source storage maker of TrueNAS, has made great progress on TrueNAS Scale, as the second release is now ready following a 1st release last February. The team has joined the recent 43rd IT Press Tour for a company and product update and we had the pleasure, once again, to meet Brett Davis, EVP Sales and Marketing, Morgan Littlewood, SVP Products, Kris Moore, SVP Engineering and Mario Blandini, VP Marketing at iX now.

The company continues to promote Open Storage as a serious approach for enterprises and a key disruptor for innovation adoption. So far iX annual turn-over reaches $100 million making the company a serious player and promoting a super fast growth. Is it the fastest as the company mentioned, I'm not sure as VAST Data for instance also displays a very rapid growth curve. But the company has passed the 200 employees barrier with a significant footprint within the Fortune 500.

Being a bit confidential due to some lack of visibility, the disconnect between iX and TrueNAS seems to have an impact on the company. Approximately 2 years ago, the company has decided to unify FreeNAS and TrueNAS under TrueNAS brand to accelerate the recognition and we have to say that it was a good decision. TrueNAS has become a real product family with Core, Enterprise and Scale iterations.

Having said that I have some difficulties to understand why and how TrueNAS Scale represents the next generation NAS. I get the idea that iX needs a scale-out architecture but the fact that it's a hyper-converged approach is independent of the nature of the NAS or its scalability property. We find for many years on the market bare metal scale-out NAS. They're just implementation attributes. At the same time promoting a NAS with a block interface in addition to file and objet clearly introduces some confusion as NAS is about file or unstructured data so it is implicitly associated with NAS - NFS and SMB industry standard file sharing protocols - and potentially S3. If you associated file and block on the same platform, you have to speak about a unified storage platform. More globally is HCI a storage solution? for sure not or it's at the same time a compute solution so it is more than storage or not only storage but it's not a storage solution. Do users pick Nutanix for file service or block service? I'm sure not but applications hosted by Nutanix clusters can consume block and/or file data.

Back to iX, we measured all the progress made by the company with TrueNAS 12.0 then 13.0 and of course TrueNAS Scale, a key strategic asset for the company future.

TrueNAS 12.0 supports mature OpenZFS features and Fusion Pools to boost metadata and small IOs operations, security enhancements, performance improvements and NVMe hotplug among others. Now TrueNAS 13.0 shows a major other maturity step, the image below lists all features.

Now the other key direction for iX is TrueNAS Scale to address scalability and capacity limitations of "classic" TrueNAS, performance and cloud-native applications with the support of KVM, container and Kubernetes thus promoting a scalable HCI approach. This second release clearly confirms a solid model for this product iteration with various storage layout possibilities. The next release around the end of 2022 named Bluefin should deliver new security capabilities such as FIPS certification, API ACLs, scale-out snapshots, clustered CSI for Kubernetes, node addition and removal and GDS, the new global distributed storage, a p2p approach.

The management console TrueCommand, introduced during a past tour edition, also received a new release, version 2.2, continuing the support of all the TrueNAS flavors and hardware series, local or remote, running on AWS and with the supports of VM with KVM, containers with Docker and Kubernetes.

iX confirms its uniqueness on the market with a wide and comprehensive offering addressing current challenges but also new ones. We realized what have been done and we anticipated an interesting for Scale.