Data growth continues to accelerate, depleting storage infrastructures and putting pressure on organizations to find ways to control storage costs. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often try to cut costs by using consumer-grade storage, but that’s a risky strategy. While it will certainly reduce costs in the short term, it creates the very real possibility of increasing downtime and operating costs in the future.
Simply put, consumer-grade technology is designed for consumer-grade workloads. For example, consumer-grade hard drives are typically designed to handle an annual workload limit of approximately 25 TB per year, much less than the 500 TB annual limit for most enterprise-grade drives. Unsurprisingly, failure rates skyrocket when consumer-grade drives are connected to arrays and are subjected to data center workloads.
Another big difference is the always-on nature of the business environment. Data center storage arrays are powered on all the time and are rarely idle for an extended period of time. When they do not support application requests or data saves, they are often involved in error detection, system backup, and other maintenance tasks, all of which put additional stress on mechanical components. Consumer devices weren’t designed for that kind of constant activity.
In hybrid arrays that combine traditional hard drives with flash-based solid state drives (SSDs), it has become quite common to use consumer SSDs as a cost control method. The theory is that since flash drives are electronic without the mechanical limitations of hard drives, they can handle the extra workload. However, there are multiple tradeoffs.
The life expectancy of a flash drive is measured by the number of write or erase cycles it can take before it becomes unstable. Consumer drives designed for light duty activities lack the durability of business-class SSDs and can wear out more than 10 times faster. Enterprise SSD also offers significantly faster data transfer speeds with multi-Gigabit-per-second throughput compared to approximately 2500 Mbps for top-of-the-line consumer products.
Consumer-grade storage can provide plug-and-play simplicity, but without any of the scalability, capacity, or optimization features of an enterprise-grade solution. However, many SMBs often feel like they have no other choice due to the upfront costs of enterprise-grade storage.
iXsystems is removing that barrier with its line of TrueNAS storage devices designed for smaller organizations that need reliable enterprise-class storage. Based on the FreeNAS open source software-defined storage system, the TrueNAS X10 is a unified storage array that offers 20 TB of hybrid block and file storage for less than $ 10,000.
TrueNAS X10 arrays are loaded with enterprise-grade capabilities, including VMware, Citrix, and Veeam certifications, integration with public clouds, capacity-efficiency features such as block-level inline compression, deduplication and thin provisioning, as well as snapshots, replication and data. -encryption at rest.
TrueNAS X10 is available in a single-controller or dual-controller configuration. iXsystems recommends the dual controller configuration for customers who require high availability, but note that those with budget constraints may opt for the single controller version initially and then upgrade to a dual configuration at a later time. Each storage controller is anchored by a high-performance Intel Xeon D-1531 Systems-on-a-Chip (SOC) processor.
While it’s important to limit costs and save cash where possible, you need reliable technology to drive business efficiency. With data growth accelerating at a rapid rate, using consumer-grade solutions to address your storage needs is a gamble that could result in downtime, data loss, and other operational issues.