Open Storage Is Disrupting The Enterprise Market

By Morgan Littlewood, SVP, TrueNAS Product Management, iXsystems, Inc.

Virtually every organization in the world relies on digital automation, making data more valuable today than ever before. Preventing data loss is thus a paramount concern, making storage system reliability an absolute imperative for organizations of all sizes. Delivering on this requirement, enterprise-class Open Source software is emerging as the key to resilient, enterprise-grade storage affordable for all. 

Any storage system today must offer a comprehensive array of features and capabilities. Some of the most desirable functions, such as silent corruption detection, data reduction, and write cache resilience in the face of power outages, were traditionally restricted to proprietary storage solutions targeting the largest enterprises. Open storage is changing this industry dynamic by dramatically lowering the true cost of these important enterprise-level features.

The cost of storage impacts today’s organization in a number of ways, some more subtle than others. Large enterprises are often more agile because their IT is more capable. They can afford to pay for the full suite of features offered by traditional storage vendors. This means they can unlock the widest range of product capabilities they consume while smaller competitors often struggle to work around those same vendors’ artificially-imposed limitations. 

Making enterprise storage features affordable to all is disruptive. It’s disruptive not only to the storage industry but to any industry where larger competitors are more agile because they can afford more comprehensive and capable IT.  Open storage democratizes enterprise storage and levels the playing field.