Data growth continues to accelerate, straining 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 higher operating costs and downtime 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 about 25TB per year, much less than the 500TB annual limit for most enterprise-grade drives. Unsurprisingly, failure rates skyrocket as consumer units are plugged into arrays and subjected to data center workloads.
Another big difference is the always-on nature of the business environment. Data center storage arrays are on all the time and are rarely down for an extended period of time. When they are not supporting application requests or saving data, they are often involved in troubleshooting, system backup, and other maintenance tasks, all of which place additional stress on mechanical components. Consumer-grade devices just 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-grade SSDs as a method of cost control. 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 activities lack the durability of enterprise-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 performance compared to 2,500 Mbps in top-of-the-line consumer products.
Consumer-grade storage can provide plug-and-play simplicity, but without the scalability, capacity, or optimization features of an enterprise-grade solution. However, many SMBs often feel like they have no choice due to the up-front 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 open source FreeNAS software-defined storage system, TrueNAS X10 is a unified storage array that offers 20TB 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-efficient features like 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 requiring high availability, but notes that those with budget constraints can opt for the single-controller version initially and then upgrade to a dual configuration at a later time. Each storage controller is anchored to a high-performance Intel Xeon D-1531 system-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 breakneck pace, using consumer-grade solutions to address your storage needs is a gamble that could lead to downtime, data loss, and other operational issues.