IXsystems announced the unification of your products for the rapid deployment of network storage (NAS, network attached storage). The free distribution of FreeNAS will merge with the commercial project THUNDERS (two open source operating systems based on BSD UNIX and dedicated network storage), expanding the capabilities of FreeNAS for enterprises and pre-installed in storage systems manufactured by iXsystems.
For historical reasons, FreeNAS and TrueNAS were developed, tested and released separately, despite the large amount of common code. To bring the projects together, a lot of work was needed to unify the distribution systems and packages.
FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD code base, It features built-in ZFS support and the ability to manage through a web interface built using the Python Django framework. FTP, NFS, Samba, AFP, rsync, and iSCSI are supported To organize storage access, software RAID (0,1,5) can be used to increase storage reliability, and LDAP / Active Directory support is implemented for customer authorization.
In version 11.3, the TrueNAS code reached parity with FreeNAS in the field of support for plugins and virtual environments, and the volume of the joint code exceeded the 95% mark, which allowed to proceed to work on the final merge of projects.
In version 12.0, scheduled for the second half of the year, FreeNAS and TrueNAS will merge and present under the common name "TrueNAS Open Storage".
From the beginning at iXsystems, we have developed, tested, documented and released both as separate products, despite the vast majority of code being shared. This was a deliberate technical decision at first, but over time it became a lesser need and more of 'how we've always done it
Despite the unification, there will still be two versions operating system available: TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. Both are billed as professional-grade software, but use of TrueNAS Enterprise will require a license to access an extended set of features, while TrueNAS CORE will remain free.
The first will be similar to FreeNAS and delivered free of charge and the second will focus on providing additional opportunities for companies.
The combination will speed up development and shorten the release preparation cycle to 6 months, strengthen quality control, synchronize development with FreeBSD to provide faster support for new teams, simplify documentation, unify sites, simplify migration between distributions. commercial and free, will accelerate the transition to OpenZFS 2.0 based on "ZFS on Linux".
In a blog post dedicated to this announcement, iXsystems said:
“TrueNAS CORE 12.0 will benefit from some important advancements over FreeNAS 11.3. This will include support for Fusion Pools (combination of SSD and HDD vdev) and data encryption. With the announcement of the release of version 12.0 BETA a more complete list of hundreds of improvements will be made ”.
The organization goes on to say:
“TrueNAS customers will see a less significant name change with the change to version 12.0, but will notice a change in the new shark fin icon. The FreeNAS shark icon is well known, but this modernized icon represents the stealthy but powerful storage competitor that TrueNAS has become. "
TrueNAS Enterprise the successor of TrueNAS inherits all the strengths of its predecessor. TrueNAS Enterprise systems will automatically have TrueNAS CORE functionality, as well as a pre-installed key that enables Enterprise functionality.
For those who can't wait to see what the TrueNAS editor has in store for them, a preview of TrueNAS 12.0 (nightly version) will be available for download before March 11. The final version of the new unified operating system is expected to arrive in the third quarter of this year.
Finally, if you want to know more about it about the news, you can check the details in the announcement that ixsystems made on their blog. The link is this.