Debian-based TrueNAS Scale Updated – And IXsystems Wins A Gong

Enterprise NAS vendor iXsystems has updated its Kubernetes-capable Debian-based NAS OS, and scored Digital Public Good status too.

iXsystems now has a family of dedicated storage-server OSes, and the new release of TrueNAS Scale, version 22.12.1. The company has a very cautious, slow-moving lifecycle – which is what you want from a vendor whose offerings will hold all your corporate data.

At the end of last year, it released Scale 22.12, codenamed "Bluefin", as we predicted when we covered TrueNAS Core version 13 last May. The company's Morgan Littlewood told us: "'Bluefin' was the first full release, and this is the 'point-one' version of that."

At the time of writing, the company's Software Status page hasn't yet been updated with the new version, but there you can read its description of the suitability of each version. Its point-one releases mark the point where it considers the software ready for production use for "general", "conservative" and "mission-critical" customers.

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TrueNAS Scale is the newest edition of TrueNAS, and slightly surprisingly for the biggest commercial vendor of FreeBSD products, Scale is based on Linux: specifically, on Debian. The reason is basically Kubernetes. Otherwise, Scale looks and works very much like its elder siblings: it has the same UI, and runs on the same OpenZFS storage back-end as the FreeBSD-based TrueNAS Core, which is the free edition of the OS that the company sells on its Enterprise products. You can even do an in-place upgrade from the FreeBSD-based TrueNAS Core to TrueNAS Scale, and it will retain your config – it will even migrate Core's bhyve-based VMs to Scale's KVM VMs.

Reg sister site Blocks & Files has looked at TrueNAS Scale's clustering support, as well as its cloudy Global Distributed Storage partnership with StorJ.

The company is also proud that TrueNAS has won certification as a Digital Public Good. The DPG standard is a worldwide cooperative effort to ensure that FOSS products meet the United Nations' guidelines for digital cooperation.

It also has a new model in what, for iXsystems, is its low-end line, TrueNAS Mini. The TrueNAS Mini-R is a 12-drive rackmount model and starts at $1,998, so it's not going to cause consumer NAS shifters such as Synology to sweat. Its offering for home users is the free TrueNAS Core, which you can run on any PC-compatible kit: The Reg FOSS desk has a couple of instances, one on an old HP Microserver N54L and another on a slightly newer Microserver G8. It works fine in 8GB of RAM, and happily talks SMB, NFS and AppleTalk, including acting as a networked Time Machine for a couple of old Intel Macs. ®