Quantum StorNext is well suited in environments with a high, fast paced workflow, with lots and lots of client systems connected, all needing to share the same assets, where you cannot have one moment of downtime. With the pace nowadays that clients expect work to get done, as opposed to 10 years or so ago (pre-iPhone social media instant instant gotta have it right away days), even downtime of 30 minutes can back up your whole workflow. As they say, time is money and Quantum StorNext almost certainly guarantees you have little to no downtime at all. It just works, silently, quietly in the background, making sure everyone is performing at 100% of their potential or more.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We have many TrueNAS units deployed and they've served us well everywhere. Our most common use case is using it as storage backing for virtual machines. We have Proxmox talking to it, as well as having it acting as the hypervisor. We've never lost data with it, even when faced with multiple disk failures. We've also always found the performance to be robust and able to handle the needs of our clients. Our clients range from libraries, to medium sized enterprises and we've always been able to make it work, and work reliably.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Quantum StorNext just works and by that, I mean it just works flawlessly in the background, while your artists are doing their creative work on jobs with clients. Technical issues and hold-ups should never get in the way of the creative process.
There is a lot of flexibility with StorNext and options available in software and hardware, to customize the best solution for your workflow.
Great customer support and response times when things do need supporting, whether there is an issue with a piece of hardware (i.e. battery backup to a controller unit that needs replacing). Quantum along with our local support vendor are fast to respond.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Price. Obviously, when you are at the level of performance that is needed for our work, Quantum can only go so low as a company on cost, to give their customers a blockbuster deal. But any possible discount here and there helps, and Quantum does their best to lower it as low as possible with bundles and pricing deals. By no means is price a deterring factor, for if you are playing at this level (Ferrari vs Camaro), you know it's going to expensive, but it's a solid investment if you want the reliability and performance. And it's actually cheaper when you compare it to other competitors, along with upgrade paths down the road that will cost you less.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?
The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login
The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.
The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.
Our first shared storage was from Facilis. This is a great company, with great hardware and software, of which we use in our NYC office. At the time, it did what we needed it to do and performed smoothly. But then our workflow expanded dramatically and needed to look for the level of SANs in the Quantum range. We passed our Facilis along to the NYC office and ended up getting an Active Storage SAN, which ran on StorNext. That company unfortunately went out of business a few years back (they are back in business within the last year, but I think Chinese owned), so we looked into getting a fully integrated all-in-one Quantum system that included its branded storage and MDCs to work with StorNext.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I chose TrueNAS (upgrading from FreeNAS) because of the small footprint, ease of use, and reliability of the ZFS file system. The file sharing protocols supported as well as the intuitive interface all make TrueNAS a great choice for business and hobbyists alike.
Quantum StorNext has allowed us to not only perform at a higher level, but greatly expand how many client systems are connected to the SAN. Prior to Quantum, our old SAN could barely handle the workload of half the client systems we have now. So for ROI, I'm not involved with the actual numbers, but I know our work with clients has expanded ten fold and there is no sign of it slowing down.
Confidence and my time not wasted, working with the support vendors to solve a problem. My time is then spent on other areas and projects in the company, not on phone calls and emails.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware.
Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives.
The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing.
