TrueNAS

Last updated
TrueNAS
Developer(s) iXsystems
Stable release
13.0-U6.1 / December 7, 2023;10 months ago (2023-12-07)
Repository
Operating system FreeBSD
Platform x86-64 (v9.2.1.9 was the last release that supported 32-bit. [1] )
Type Computer storage
License BSD license
Website truenas.com
TrueNAS SCALE
Developer(s) iXsystems
Stable release
24.04.0 (Dragonfish) / May 3, 2024;5 months ago (2024-05-03)
Repository
Operating system Debian Linux
Platform x86-64
Type Computer storage
License LGPL-3.0
Website truenas.com/truenas-scale

TrueNAS is a family of network-attached storage (NAS) products produced by iXsystems, incorporating both FOSS, as well as commercial offerings. Based on the OpenZFS file system, TrueNAS runs on FreeBSD as well as Linux and is available under the BSD License It is compatible with x86-64 hardware and is also available as turnkey appliances from iXsystems.

Contents

TrueNAS can be used on a large quantity of network clients, including Windows, macOS and Unix, and is compatible with virtualization hosts such as XCP-NG, XenServer and VMware. Networking protocols supported by TrueNAS include SMB, AFP, NFS, iSCSI, SSH, rsync and FTP/TFTP. Advanced features include full-disk encryption and a plug-in architecture for third-party software. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

History

The TrueNAS project originated as FreeNAS, created by Olivier Cochard-Labbé in October 2005, based on the m0n0wall firewall and FreeBSD 6.0. The project evolved over time, with Volker Theile joining in 2006 and later leading the project. In 2009, development shifted towards Debian Linux, resulting in the creation of OpenMediaVault. Cochard-Labbé returned to oversee the project's transition to iXsystems, [8] [9] where FreeNAS was re-engineered and rebranded as TrueNAS.

iXsystems released FreeNAS 8 in 2010, marking a significant rewrite of the software based on FreeBSD 8.1. Subsequent versions introduced features such as full-disk encryption, plug-in architectures, and support for OpenZFS. TrueNAS continued evolving, with notable later releases including FreeNAS Corral and TrueNAS CORE.

TrueNAS CORE (previously FreeNAS) version history

BranchInitial releaseLatest BuildReleasedFreeBSD versionStatusNotes / Changes
9.102016-03-239.10.2-U42017-05-2510.3 STABLEPrevious Release [10]
10.0 ("Corral")2017-03-15N/A  Withdrawn: relegated to preview onlyThe "Corral" branch was cancelled on or around 23 April 2017, the developers citing as reasons that although it had been a major "ground up" rewrite of FreeNAS, too many issues had emerged within 2 weeks of release. Development reverted to the proven 9.10 branch of FreeNAS and the Corral branch was relegated to a "technology preview". [11] [12]
11.0 [13] 2017-06-14RELEASE2017-06-1411 STABLEPrevious release(Compared to 9.10 branch): [14] [15]
  • Beta version of new user interface based on Angular (optional)
  • Built-in Virtual Machine management (default hypervisor: bhyve)
  • Updated alerts system and support for multiple alert services
  • Jails management via iocage
  • 20% speed improvement of FreeBSD kernel compared to 9.10. [15]
  • Amazon S3 compatible object storage services, allowing S3 based cloud services to run on a FreeNAS platform
  • Enhancements to Active Directory services to maintain services and consistent mappings if networking is disrupted.
  • Updates to Samba (4.6.3) and Netatalk (3.1.10)
11.12017-12-13RELEASE2017-12-1311 STABLEPrevious ReleaseChanges include the addition of cloud synchronization and preliminary Docker container support, as well as updates to the Angular-based administrative GUI and noticeable OpenZFS improvements for handling large files and multiple snapshots. [16] [17]
11.22018-07-09 [18] RELEASE2018-12-0511.2 STABLE [19] Previous ReleaseHighlights from release announcement: [20]
  • New, Angular-based UI
  • Boot loader has changed from GRUB to the native FreeBSD boot loader
  • Jails backend has switched from warden to iocage
  • Support has been added for Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs)
  • OpenZFS is up-to-date with Illumos
11.32019-11-15 [21] RELEASE2020-01-2811.3 STABLE [22] Previous releaseHighlights from release announcement: [22]
  • Re-implemented Replication Engine, allows up to 10Gb replication speeds (a 10x improvement), resume support on failed transfers, as well as ability to replicate locally.
  • ACL Manager – Allows setup and management of SMB ACL’s directly via the FreeNAS web interface.
  • SMB Shadow Copies are now enabled by default for new shares – Note: Snapshots will only show up in Windows “Previous Versions Tab” if the snapshot USED size shows changes to the file.
  • A repository of Community plugins has been created, users can now create and distribute 3rd party plugins which are not officially iXsystems supported.
  • Updated translations for Czech, French, Japanese, Russian, and Simplified Chinese. Additionally, the process to add additional translations has been greatly improved.
  • iSCSI Wizard – Streamlines the process of creating new iSCSI targets down to a few clicks.
  • Alert System Overhaul – More granular alerts, as well as controls to set alert thresholds.
  • Dashboard Updates – The initial dashboard now shows a live view of system status, including network traffic, CPU / memory utilization and more.
  • NAT Support for Plugins – Eliminates the need for each plugin to have a dedicated IP address on your network.
  • Full featured 2.0 API – Includes both REST and Websocket connections, allowing FreeNAS to be fully scripted and driven via the same API used by the web-interface.
  • Large Pool Creation Assistance – When creating ZFS pools with large number of disks, the UI provides an automated way to repeat a VDEV layout across all remaining disks.
  • ZFS Performance optimizations across the board for many different workloads.
12.02020-10-2012.0-U8.12022-4-2212.0-STABLEPrevious releaseHighlights from release announcement.
  • Native ZFS encryption, allowing per-dataset encryption and
  • 2-factor authentication support, allowing an extra layer of security when accessing TrueNAS
  • KMIP support - allowing interfacing with KMIP servers for storage and retrieval of passwords and encryption keys
  • TrueNAS API 2.0 now supports API keys for remote access. API v1.0 has been deprecated.
  • Fusion pool support, allowing flash-based VDEVS that store metadata and small-block IO
  • OpenVPN support (both server and client)
  • TrueCommand cloud client integration
13.02022-5-10 [23] 13.0-U22022-8-3013.0-U2Current releaseHighlights from release announcement.
  • TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1 SMB fixes
  • ZFS 2.1.5 updates
  • SAMBA 4.15.9 updates
  • SMB1 Security vulnerability resolution
  • NextCloud Jail installation fixes
  • Intel E810 NIC performance improvement
  • Collected memory leak fix
  • AWS S3 Secret Keys for Cloud Sync fix

Architecture

The reimplementation of FreeNAS with version 8.0 transitioned the project onto a new architecture based on FreeBSD's NanoBSD embedded build system, Python, Django, and the dōjō toolkit. The initial web server, lighttpd, was later replaced by nginx in subsequent versions.

Awards

See also

Related Research Articles

A disk array controller is a device that manages the physical disk drives and presents them to the computer as logical units. It almost always implements hardware RAID, thus it is sometimes referred to as RAID controller. It also often provides additional disk cache.

m0n0wall was an embedded firewall distribution of FreeBSD, one of the BSD operating system descendants. It provides a small image which can be put on Compact Flash cards as well as on CD-ROMs and hard disks. It runs on a number of embedded platforms and generic PCs. The PC version can be run with just a Live CD and a floppy disk to store configuration data, or on a single Compact Flash card. This eliminates the need for a hard drive, which reduces noise and heat levels and decreases the risk of system failure through elimination of moving parts found in older hard drives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nexenta OS</span> Discontinued computer operating system

Nexenta OS, officially known as the Nexenta Core Platform, is a discontinued computer operating system based on OpenSolaris and Ubuntu that runs on IA-32- and x86-64-based systems. It emerged in fall 2005, after Sun Microsystems started the OpenSolaris project in June of that year. Nexenta Systems, Inc. initiated the project and sponsored its development. Nexenta OS version 1.0 was released in February 2008.

In computer science, storage virtualization is "the process of presenting a logical view of the physical storage resources to" a host computer system, "treating all storage media in the enterprise as a single pool of storage."

Gluster Inc. was a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage. The company was privately funded and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an engineering center in Bangalore, India. Gluster was funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Gluster was acquired by Red Hat on October 7, 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Overland Storage</span>

Overland Storage Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sphere 3D Corp. It has acquired Tandberg Data shortly before being acquired by Sphere 3D itself. The two subsidiaries were later rebranded under the common Overland-Tandberg brand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FreeBSD</span> Free and open-source Unix-like operating system

FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD and the current version runs on IA-32, x86-64, ARM, PowerPC and RISC-V processors. The project is supported and promoted by the FreeBSD Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VMware ESXi</span> Enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor for deploying and serving virtual computers

VMware ESXi is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware, a subsidiary of Broadcom, for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); instead, it includes and integrates vital OS components, such as a kernel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dell EMC Isilon</span> Network-attached storage

Dell EMC Isilon is a scale out network-attached storage platform offered by Dell EMC for high-volume storage, backup and archiving of unstructured data. It provides a cluster-based storage array based on industry standard hardware, and is scalable to 50 petabytes in a single filesystem using its FreeBSD-derived OneFS file system.

Sun Open Storage was an open source computer data storage platform developed by Sun Microsystems. Sun Open Storage was advertised as avoiding vendor lock-in.

iXsystems, Inc. is a privately owned American computer technology company based in San Jose, California that develops, sells and supports computing and storage products and services. Its principal products are customized open source FreeBSD distributions, including the discontinued desktop operating system TrueOS, the FreeBSD based file servers and network attached storage systems TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Enterprise, and the Linux based TrueNAS SCALE. It also markets hardware platforms for these products, and develops enterprise-scale storage architectures and converged infrastructures. As part of its activities, the company has strong ties to the FreeBSD community, has repeatedly donated hardware and support to fledgling projects within the BSD community, and sponsors and develops development within FreeBSD, as well as being a sponsor and attendee of open-source community events.

RecoverPoint is a continuous data protection product offered by Dell EMC which supports asynchronous and synchronous data replication of block-based storage. RecoverPoint was originally created by a company called Kashya, which was bought by EMC in 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenMediaVault</span> NAS operating system

OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a free Linux distribution designed for network-attached storage (NAS). The project's lead developer is Volker Theile, who instituted it in 2009. OMV is based on the Debian operating system, and is licensed through the GNU General Public License v3.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">StarWind Software</span> American computer storage company

StarWind Software, Inc. is a privately held Beverly, Massachusetts-based computer software and hardware appliance company specializing in storage virtualization and software-defined storage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XigmaNAS</span> Software

XigmaNAS is an open-source Network-attached storage (NAS) server software with a dedicated management web interface. It is a continuation of the original FreeNAS code, which was developed between 2005 and late 2011. It was released under the name NAS4Free on 22 March 2012. The name was changed to XigmaNAS in July 2018. On SourceForge, it was elected "'Community Choice' Project of the Month" twice, in August 2015 and March 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenZFS</span> Open-source implementation of the ZFS file system

OpenZFS is an open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager initially developed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system, and is now maintained by the OpenZFS Project. Similar to the original ZFS, the implementation supports features like data compression, data deduplication, copy-on-write clones, snapshots, RAID-Z, and virtual devices that can create filesystems that span multiple disks.

bhyve is a type-2 (hosted) hypervisor initially written for FreeBSD. It can also be used on a number of illumos based distributions including SmartOS, OpenIndiana, and OmniOS. A port of bhyve to macOS called xhyve is also available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nexenta Systems</span> Software company

Nexenta by DDN, Inc., is a subsidiary of DataDirect Networks that sells computer data storage and backup software. It is headquartered in San Jose, California. Nexenta developed NexentaStor, NexentaCloud, NexentaFusion, and NexentaEdge. It was founded as Nexenta Systems, Inc., in 2005.

ZFS is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, including ZFS, were published under an open source license as OpenSolaris for around 5 years from 2005 before being placed under a closed source license when Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 2009–2010. During 2005 to 2010, the open source version of ZFS was ported to Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. In 2010, the illumos project forked a recent version of OpenSolaris, including ZFS, to continue its development as an open source project. In 2013, OpenZFS was founded to coordinate the development of open source ZFS. OpenZFS maintains and manages the core ZFS code, while organizations using ZFS maintain the specific code and validation processes required for ZFS to integrate within their systems. OpenZFS is widely used in Unix-like systems.

References

  1. ↑ "Hardware Requirements".
  2. ↑ iXSystems FreeNAS Mini NAS Review - Tom's Hardware
  3. ↑ The Arc NAS distribution shootout: FreeNAS vs NAS4Free | Ars Technica
  4. ↑ FreeNAS: Flexible, fast storage, and price is right | Network World
  5. ↑ FreeNAS — network-attached storage with ZFS [LWN.net]
  6. ↑ FreeNAS releases version 11, so let us put the unpleasantness of failed V.10 behind us · The Register
  7. ↑ There's inexpensive NAS and then there's FreeNAS | Computerworld
  8. ↑ "Project of the Month, January 2007". SourceForge. January 2007. Archived from the original on 2008-03-13. Retrieved 2013-08-23.
  9. ↑ "Interview with Olivier Cochard-Labbé, Founder of FreeNAS". BSD Magazine. Retrieved 2013-08-23.
  10. ↑ FreeNAS 9.10 Released
  11. ↑ FreeNAS Corral Status: From “RELEASE” to “TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW” Status
  12. ↑ Embarrassing! FreeNAS downgrades latest release to 'tech preview' • The Register
  13. ↑ FreeNAS 11.0 Released - Phoronix
  14. ↑ FreeNAS 11.0 is Now Here
  15. 1 2 FreeNAS 11.0 release notes: Initial testing indicates that the FreeNAS 11 kernel is 20% faster than FreeNAS 9.10
  16. ↑ FreeNAS 11.1 is Now Available for Download!
  17. ↑ FreeNAS 11.1-RELEASE - iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers
  18. ↑ "FreeNAS 11.2-BETA1". iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers. Retrieved 2019-01-26.
  19. ↑ "FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE User Guide". www.ixsystems.com. Retrieved 2019-01-26.
  20. ↑ FreeNAS 11.2 has Arrived
  21. ↑ "FreeNAS 11.3-BETA1". iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  22. 1 2 "FreeNAS 11.3-RELEASE". iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  23. ↑ "13.0 Release Notes". iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  24. ↑ "FreeNAS is a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) server". VMware, Inc. Archived from the original on 2008-05-05. Retrieved 2008-02-28.
  25. ↑ "Project of the Month January 2007". SourceForge, Inc. January 2007. Archived from the original on 2008-03-13. Retrieved 2008-02-28.
  26. ↑ "Best of open source in storage - 2007". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2008-02-28.
  27. ↑ "MES Matters 2022 Details". CRN. Retrieved 2022-09-05.
  28. ↑ "iXsystems Recognized in 11th Annual Best in Biz Awards for Most Innovative Product Line of the Year". iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers. 2021-12-02. Retrieved 2022-09-05.
  29. ↑ "Asigra TrueNAS® Backup Appliance Named Backup/DR Hardware Product of the Year". iXsystems, Inc. - Enterprise Storage & Servers. 2019-02-20. Retrieved 2022-09-05.
  30. ↑ Inc, Gartner. "iXsystems TrueNAS Enterprise Reviews, Ratings & Features 2023 | Gartner Peer Insights". Gartner. Retrieved 2023-08-09.{{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  31. ↑ "TrueNAS - DPGA Details". app.digitalpublicgoods.net. Retrieved 2023-08-09.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.