Universities Space Research Association Chooses iXsystems TrueNAS

iXsystems, Inc., in storage and servers driven by Open Source, announced that the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) selected TrueNAS unified storage to keep their growing scientific and engineering data online.

The TrueNAS array will be used by the USRA to support the data generated by the NASA Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) project. TrueNAS gives the USRA a scalable storage system that can grow to 4PB using 40% of the rack space and costing 50% less than competitive storage solutions.

“Our project currently stores vast amounts of scientific and engineering data, and our storage requirements are incrementally growing by several factors on an annualized basis,” said Jonathan Wong, USRA. “For convenience, security, and performance reasons, we needed to maximize our storage solution to a scalable unified storage system, which made TrueNAS an easy choice. We also get instant online access and long-term file integrity thanks to the TrueNAS and E60.“

Combining the TrueNAS TCO with its variety of services and protocols, an easy to manage file system, and data protection options meant TrueNAS solved all of USRA’s storage needs in one array, ensuring the Stratospheric Observatory’s data stays pristine and secure for posterity.

“The USRA wanted to keep all their data online for many reasons, instead of archiving it or storing it in the cloud,” said Gary Archer, director of storage marketing, iXsystems. “Many customers are looking at ways to be more economical. A TrueNAS Z35 scales to 4PB and lets customers save on power and storage costs. With a lower TCO than most of the competition, TrueNAS is the best value in hybrid storage.“

Traditionally dense expansion shelves can create I/O bottlenecks in a storage array, but TrueNAS solves this with TrueCacheT, a combination of RAM and nonvolatile flash with high-density spinning disks, providing a cache-first storage approach that delivers blistering performance from flash memory for your most frequently accessed data on SAN and NAS. TrueNAS also protects this data from corruption and has built-in local and remote replication, intelligent inline compression/deduplication, and encryption. It also includes 24/7 US-based technical support.

With TrueNAS, users store more data at a price below what many cloud-storage providers charge to transfer and access data.