mid 2020 we share the news here on the blog de iXsystems (the company behind FreeNAS and TrueNAS) was already working on a new project called "TrueNAS SCALE" in which the novelty is the using the Linux kernel and the Debian 11 package base (Testing), while all of the company's previous products, including TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD), were based on FreeBSD.
And now, after a little more than half a year of said news, iXsystems has released the news that it has published the first stable version of the “TrueNAS SCALE” distribution kit, which, as already mentioned, stands out for using the Linux kernel. and the base of the Debian package.
It is mentioned that development and support of FreeBSD-based TrueNAS CORE (FreeNAS) will continue, whereby current FreeBSD and Linux-based solutions will co-exist and complement each other using a common toolkit code base and standard web interface. .
About TrueNAS SCALE
TrueNAS SCALE uses ZFS (OpenZFS) as file system and also provide an additional edition based on the Linux kernel it is due to the desire to implement some ideas that are unattainable using FreeBSD.
It should be noted that this is not the first such initiative: in 2009, the OpenMediaVault distribution kit was already separated from FreeNAS, which was transferred to the Linux kernel and the base of the Debian package.
“iX is different from other storage vendor partners in the way they develop outdoor products.” said Don Bustin, CTO, AMPD Ventures Inc. "This transparency and validation that comes from a large community involved throughout development reduces risk and gives us confidence along the way and when products reach general availability."
“TrueNAS SCALE has been a nearly three-year effort by the iXsystems engineering team, with the goal of fully supporting Linux Containers and VM technologies alongside existing TrueNAS storage features,” said Kris Moore, Senior Vice President of Engineering at iXsystems. . “The milestone of TrueNAS SCALE LAUNCH is the start of its next chapter as a product, and we welcome all members of the Linux and storage community to join us on this exciting new TrueNAS journey. “
One of the key improvements in TrueNAS SCALE is the ability to create multi-node storage, while TrueNAS CORE (FreeNAS) is positioned as a single server solution.
In addition to increasing scalability, TrueNAS SCALE also distinguished by the use of insulated containers, simplified infrastructure management, and suitability for building software-defined infrastructures. Twheels SCALE provides support for Docker containers, KVM-based virtualization and multi-node ZFS scaling using the Gluster distributed file system.
access to storage supports SMB, NFS, iSCSI Block Storage, S3 Object API and Cloud Sync. To ensure secure access, the connection can be made via VPN (OpenVPN). Storage can be deployed on a single node and then gradually expanded horizontally as needs grow by adding additional nodes.
In addition to performing storage tasks, nodes can also be used to provide services and run applications in containers orchestrated using the Kubernetes platform or in KVM-based virtual machines.
In the future, it is planned to introduce a catalog of ready-to-use containers with additional apps like NextCloud and Jenkins. Future plans also mention support for OpenStack, K8s, KubeVirt, pNFS, Wireguard, FS snapshot scaling, and replication.
Like TrueNAS CORE (FreeNAS), the new product is free to download and use. The size of the iso image is 1,5 GB. The build scripts, web interface, and layers specific to TrueNAS SCALE are developed on GitHub.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
