Today iXsystems, the company behind FreeNAS and TrueNAS presented un new project that was notable for several reasons, «TrueNAS SCALE» which focuses on scalable, converged, active-active containers, easy-to-manage infrastructure.
This project is notable because instead of TrueNAS SCALE being based on FreeBSD Like the rest of their offerings, the platform differs. Thunder SCALE will reuse much of the existing iXsystems tools built for TrueNAS, but in the background is Debian GNU / Linux 11.
It should be remembered that two months ago, iXsystems announced the merger of the free distribution of FreeNAS with the commercial project TrueNAS, expanding the capabilities of FreeNAS for companies, and also decided to stop the development of the TrueOS project (old PC-BSD).
Interestingly, in 2009, the OpenMediaVault distribution, which was carried over to the Linux kernel and the base of the Debian package, was already separate from FreeNAS.
About TrueNAS SCALE
A characteristic that stands out of this new project "TrueNAS SCALE" was 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.
TrueNAS SCALE is the new project of the company that is designed to fill a significant gap in the iXsystems storage portfolio.
We are pleased to inform developers that the source code for TrueNAS SCALE is now available on GitHub and in very active development. During the next quarter, we will provide you with more detailed information on the architecture, download links to the installation images, and more details on how to participate in the collaboration.
We are currently working hard to finish some of the basic features in a very early developer preview image.
This late night image will allow community developers and early technical preview audiences to kick the tires and be more involved in the early stages of development of this new product. SCALE will be a development project for the remainder of 2020 with a planned launch in 2021.
We are starting a new discussion group for the ESCALA project as well. If you or your organization wish to contribute to a project with these objectives, follow us and comment in the discussion group and we will keep you informed.
While ZFS is designed to be a great expansion solution, much of the market is moving towards expansion and the company needs an offer.
This is the second important step the company is taking this week to start emphasizing FreeBSD, which is important as it is a major contributor to the FreeBSD project.
For the purpose of creating a new distribution, It's called expanding scalability, simplifying infrastructure management, use Linux containers, and focus on building software-defined infrastructures.
Like FreeNAS, TrueNAS SCALE is based on the ZFS file system in the OpenZFS project implementation (ZFS On Linux is proposed as the standard implementation of ZFS). TrueNAS SCALE will also use tools developed by iXsystems for FreeNAS and TrueNAS 12.
While also the development and support of FreeNAS, TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise based on FreeBSD will continue without changes.
The key idea of the initiative is that OpenZFS 2.0 will provide support for Linux and FreeBSD, This opens the door for experiments to create universal NAS tools that are not tied to a specific operating system, and allows you to start experimenting with Linux.
Using Linux will allow you to implement some ideas that are unattainable with FreeBSD. As a result, FreeBSD and Linux-based solutions will coexist and they will complement each other, using the common code base of the toolkit.
The project is currently under development and the TrueNAS SCALE specific build scripts can be find on GitHub.
During the next quarter, it is planned to publish more detailed information on the architecture and offer regularly updated test assemblies to familiarize yourself with the development process.
The first release of TrueNAS SCALE is scheduled for 2021.
All NAS both commercial (Qnap, Synology etc) and free have evolved into application containers and there Freenas had been left behind, perhaps that is why the output of this Truenas Scale ...