 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and we're here to talk about the ix system true nas m50 that's here in front of us If you want to learn more about me or my company head over to Lawrence systems comm feel it hires for project Click the hires button at the top you like to support the channel other ways or some affiliate links down below and hey clicks On those are always appreciated so We have here a true nas m50 and I've actually pulled one of the motherboards out and I said one because yes This has dual redundant motherboards and that is pretty cool And before we jump into that we'll talk at least step back a little say what's free nas versus true nas I know this is the first question a lot of people have so free nas completely open source operating system I've done plenty of videos on my channel. You're very familiar with it Maybe and it is a excellent open source software defined storage solution that's running on zfs And the question and comment seems to come up a lot on those videos of well Is it ready for prime time? Can it be used doesn't have commercial support? Etc. Etc. And the answer is yes, and absolutely now We have actually seen large enterprises using free nas But those of them that would like to have paid support options and want those you know five nines of uptime and absolutely Want a turnkey solution hardware software with support with agreements with Warranties on all that there's any problem and then to go a step further dual redundant fail over motherboards along with you know up to 10 petabytes of storage and The currently what you see outfitted here has over 250 terabytes of storage So we'll dive into that in a second here But you were looking for that turnkey solution true nas at the commercially supported version of free nas the interface you're familiar with it is the Absolutely, this is something interesting. You can look up the most tested nas software out there. It has a very large user base and they're taking the free nas code and Rolling it in a true nas now the difference really is in the support It's all the same thing you're familiar with but one of the things they do slightly different at true nas is True nas is several months behind on free nas So they roll out a update in free nas and a couple months later in case there's any issues or any bugs Then they roll out the updates for true nas. They're mostly the same There's slight nuance differences with true nas you have a few extra tabs in there for support You also when you buy a true nas you can purchase an entire support package at different levels of how quickly you'd like a ticket responded to Warranties on the drives the hardware the motherboards and agreements to get these things back up and running for mission critical systems so if you are a decision-maker in that it spacing you're looking for a Free nas solution that you couldn't pitch to the c-suite because they go that doesn't have support or agreements This is that solution that you can pitch to them That's going to have Absolute support agreements and guarantees and you know it works really well, so we've done both of these in the field We've deployed true nas solutions to clients. We have deployed free nas solutions to clients They said really the main difference is that extra uptime and the hardware you get Specking out a system can be very difficult It's a wonderful hobby for if you're trying to build something But you don't necessarily want it You know hack something together when you're doing it in a data center that can be a little bit dicey You end up being the sole person support it doesn't mean it can't be done doesn't mean you shouldn't do it But it's something to consider that you really have to put the time in and do it And when it comes to the level of engineering that went into this, this is really impressive So doing dual motherboards and an ass server is no easy feat What they have done here is a lot of engineering to take this motherboard and keep it in sync Simultaneously with the other one connected to all the same SAS drives at the same time That being said this is how they're able to achieve a redundancy Where if one board fails the other one takes over this actually allows you to go a step further You can do updates during production You can say which one of these motherboards is the Master in which one is the backup and at that point you can load firmware updates You can load the updates on you can service the board and if one of these boards goes bad or if a Firmware update software update fails. No problem It was already running on the other one and they can be switched in real time. Like I said in production This means without having to wait till you know those Inopportune times and spending your Christmas morning updating a server because the only time the company shuts down You can go cool. I can just do this in them, you know, three o'clock on Friday And not worry about it. In case someone's going to say never update on a friday, but you know live dangerously How big is it? Well, at least cover that. I have tape measure here This does have about a 30 inch depth I just want to because the camera might be obscuring it and it does weigh a lot So this thing's having very careful not to move it much Now let's zoom in a little bit here when you actually slide the box out of the way Well, we'll show the drives real quick. Someone wants to see this It's you know, nice the drive slide in and out nice easy. It's well made everything's well well fitted Matter of fact, one of the things they do is when they package all the drives They ship them all not in the box. Everything comes really well packaged in these styrofoam Holders everything's wrapped. It's it's really really well done No problems at all doing it everything's like well machined. This doesn't feel like, you know cheap or chintzy and I did not snap the things that wasn't looking. Let me there Click no effort putting it in it doesn't so build quality really well on this Now I will spin it around once so we can show how the dual motherboards look Hey 250 terabyte still weighs a lot because we you know got some in there Um and by the way and we'll pop this out real quick because I thought this was kind of cool This isn't just a little fan that popped out for convenience. We also have some more drives in here And this spot has four ssds in it so they can slide out right like this So now you know four more spots to store some drives We do have dual power supplies not that that's exciting. It's like any other Sys server system the power supply slide out one power supplies for one board one power supplies for the other board It's pretty simple there And then this is tool list. There's just a little screw it slides down and this was able to slide Right out and it's you know fairly substantial and heavy Let's get this out of the way and take a closer look at this motherboard down here So when we take a closer look at the connectors on the back This is some of the you know magic so to speak the extra engineering that's really going in there That true nas was designed to work with this hardware to make the redundancy work So it's not like just the tray slides out and it's just a motherboard tray for convenience of service You're talking about a system that was integrated with the software to work So if you wanted to load true nas on your own hardware, there's not much point in it because your hardware wouldn't have this This is like I said some specially designed hardware Spend it around the other way Makes a lot of noise. We have Two 10 gig connectors over here. So the two 10 gig connectors We have the 40 gig qsfp and the sass expander over here Properly outfitted. This will support over 700 drives. So yeah, you can put 10 10 petabytes right now based on current drive sizes Storage together for this particular unit Now let's take a look at the overhead and a little bit closer look at the motherboard So you see we have these dual zions right here We have all the fans which the fans are removable And on these nice little rubber dampers, they just slide up carefully. No, I'm not going to pull it out all the way But yeah, completely not too hard to remove. They're not socketed like drop in ones But you know, you're not replace them. Ideally, you're not replace them that often That being said, that's what provides the cooling for this first processor And the second processor further back has its own dedicated fan And you can see all the drive connectors and the controller cards how they connect right here And the extra expanders that are in there and how they route back up to those edge connectors that we talked about right in the front With the qsfp card, we do have 40 gigs of connectivity in this but Obviously this is a standard board and you can put different cards depending on the needs and how you want to connect it up I do like in the back here having those two 10 gigs Built right in now. What we're going to be doing here for my test and my demos is going to be doing this with the 10 gigs Just just what we happen to have here at the office. So We won't be able to get the full speed that this can actually do but it has been certified with vm Citrix and vmware and there's plenty of independent tests that have pushed it to its limits to prove it can do An incredible amount of IOPS and absolutely high performance in the storage So how does this motherboard go in? Well, let's get that plugged in real quick. So the motherboard slides in like this Very carefully while some freelance engineer nervously watches me sliding. Don't shove it too hard I can picture someone saying that and I have been very careful. That's why I had this out I want I didn't want to slide it in and out multiple times. I wanted to go in very carefully and uh Slide it in and away we go This they're durable, but You don't want to abuse any of this stuff. This is very expensive Very high-end and this demo unit is you know here for us to do some demos and do some software on Provided by them as a demo unit. So unfortunately, I got to return it But while it's here, we are going to do some videos with it But I got to make sure it all stays in nice working order. Uh, so we can do some of our failover tests I'm not going to do it. Like I said in this video There's going to be some future videos where I dive deeper into it But we'll fire it up and at least talk about the software and let's hear what it sounds like fired up So I move the system over to the rack. It's installed. It's running. It's Everything's good to go But I also wanted to have it. I actually pulled the rack closer to me And the microphone's right there so you can kind of get out of the noise people. He's asked me Well, how loud is it? Um, I don't have a decibel meter, but it's kind of nice to say Well can tom continue doing his video and talking over it and From this distance, it's not bad. I'm going to push it back to push the noise a little bit further back And then we'll jump into the software now One of the things I'll point out is on the ears on the front of this is Each controller not one power button for both controllers But controller one and controller two controlled from each side of the ears So now let's log in and take a look at the IPMI lights out management here and This is nice. The first thing we're going to do is we have a power down power off reset We're logged in. It's got the IP address at the top. We have the server health. We can look at Sensor readings and this is individual. There's one of these for each one of the motherboards We're going to log into one You know, they're all pretty much the same and if you did notice that there's some blinking lights on the front That has some issues. That's because we have not gone through the setup yet Which is why we're not going to dive into the Other than just doing an introduction to the TrueNAS software There's going to be separate videos where we dive further into it Once we have it all configured and I reach out to their team and set it up. They're waiting on me We have the health event log Current power consumption on a per motherboard basis So a lot of nice features they have in here Remote control. I like this a lot HTML5 So here we go. We can launch and get there Yeah, IO errors. Those are the is not set up yet. That's why we have some IO errors We haven't set up the HA or anything. It's waiting to be done But without any stupid councils of Java or anything weird Breakthrough the browser you can access At the command prompt to be able to do things record macro options users capture Or we have the power control there So and it does have the virtual media option maintenance options for firmware factory default, etc But let's get over here and look at the TrueNAS itself So right here, uh, platform is TrueNAS M50HA And we're going to do our failover video separate But you'll be able to initiate failover and switch between the controllers It's going to give me a warning right now that we can't do that because it's not configured As you can see the HA currently is disabled But like I said, this looks a lot like the FreeNAS software. Matter of fact, it looks exactly like it Please note though, jails are missing They don't come with the hypervisor or the jails inside of here. These are dedicated to be Storage servers. So those are omitted from there And it's another difference between FreeNAS and TrueNAS is not having those as an option in there Now if you want to look real quick at like the processors in there because I said I'd cover that Is an Intel Xeon Silver 4114 CPU at 2.2 gigahertz. So we have 40 threads in here. So that's That's an impressive amount of power. So more than enough power to run quite a few Virtual machines over ice because it's not going to choke It's going to perform very very well at very high speeds with a very demanding data sets on it We'll take a look at the pool how it's created right now 124 terabytes available and let's view the distance side of here And we can see our boot pool which was provided by SATA DOMS I didn't point them out, but they were in there for the hardware Then we have the all these wonderful drives these 10.9 terabyte available, but they're the 12 terabyte western digital data center drives that they shipped with And these are those drives in the back So I pointed out that there's a few drives that you can get to from the back Those are also attached to both back planes. So they're absolutely part of the system these ones with the da right here is A few SSDs that are in there that we're going to be configuring for some different options. We'll test some caching and Z-log the zero intent log by the way, these ones in the back are the nv connector So nvme connectors on there. So a couple important notes about that So this concludes part one of the video of getting started with it What the Hardware looks like which a lot of people have been asked me about I wanted to get this video out there We'll do separate videos and I'll probably be doing in my office because I don't you know I know people want to know how loud it is, but not everyone wants to listen to software video with That humming along in the background I don't know if it's going to stay here in our studio or we're going to put it in our rack in the back When we do the testing But we're going to bring some other servers to it do some connections do some vm testing And of course the fun part do some of that torture testing and show Just how that high availability works and talk about it and Break that down a little bit more detail because that's what's real important to people is when you want to put these In as you know, not just how reliable is the hardware but can the hardware survive a fault how fault tolerant is it? And that's where things get really impressive with it And that's one of those key things is keeping that uptime in case you have a fault on one of these All right, and look for the part two coming up right after I reach out to them and get this configured And get all the ha set up and integrate it into our network. Thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from the channel Hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out If you like to hire us head over to laurance systems.com fill out our contact page And let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com Where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general Even suggestions for new videos. 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