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With the new TrueNAS H-Series systems, you get the complete TrueNAS feature set, including built-in support for file, block, and object protocols, all from the same array. Leveraging the legendary OpenZFS filesystem, the TrueNAS H-Series provides power-efficient performance, proven reliability, and guaranteed data safety. System functionality can be extended by deploying Apps such as MinIO, NextCloud, or Syncthing that can be run on the system as containers.

Ready for deployment for workloads at the Edge or in the core of the data center, the 2U TrueNAS H-Series comes in two models:

The TrueNAS H-Series can be deployed on-site in any organization, from small offices to large data centers. Customers requiring higher capacity can look to the highly scalable TrueNAS M-Series. For deployments needing 10GB/s or more, the all-flash TrueNAS F-Series solves the most demanding performance problems.

Both TrueNAS H-Series models offer a compact, 2U form factor tuned for power efficiency with twelve 3.5” drive bays. Dual hot-swap controllers allow seamless upgrades and deliver 99.999% availability at an affordable price point. See the datasheet for more details.

The TrueNAS H-Series ships with the latest TrueNAS Enterprise 24.04 software, the fourth major version of the TrueNAS data platform software on Linux. Building on the quality and award winning experience of prior versions, 24.04 delivers increased file and metadata performance, advanced SMB features, and optional TrueSECURE security features (FIPS 140, NIST) for government/defense customers.

TrueNAS H-Series Storage Highlights:

• Versatile: With options for both hybrid and all-flash solutions, the H-Series scales to meet both performance and budgetary requirements for use cases such as virtualization, file sharing, and backup.
• Power-Efficient: With a typical power consumption of 200W (H10) or 300W (H20) the TrueNAS H-Series helps meet your company or data center’s green initiatives while delivering the performance to meet your workloads.
• All the Features, One Low Cost: With no piecemeal licensing, the H-Series delivers a full suite of data service, protection, and replication features at an affordable cost of entry. Extend functionality even further with container-based Apps.
• High Availability: Available dual-controller architecture provides continuous accessibility, preventing downtime.
• Expandable: With optional 24, 60, or 102-bay (H20 only) expansion shelves, the H-Series is ready to grow with your use-case needs from 20TB all-flash to 2PB hybrid storage.

The TrueNAS H-Series replaces and builds upon the success of the popular X-Series, which is no longer available for ordering. The H-Series adds improved remote management, over 3x the performance, and 4x the memory for adding Apps while remaining in the same compact 2U form factor.

The New TrueNAS Enterprise Portfolio

TrueNAS Enterprise appliances are rated 4.9 stars or higher in verified reviews on Gartner’s customer review site, and specifically 4.9 out of 5 stars  among users of systems running TrueNAS SCALE like the new H-Series. We aim to continue to improve the customer experience  among users of TrueNAS 24.04.

The TrueNAS M-Series remains the highest-capacity system for hybrid flash and HDD requirements in the iXsystems storage portfolio. For customers demanding the ultimate in ZFS storage, the all-NVMe TrueNAS F-Series delivers unparalleled performance. All TrueNAS systems can be monitored and managed as a fleet using TrueCommand.

TrueNAS Enterprise H-Series systems start at under $10,000 with dual controllers and 1 year Bronze Support. The TrueNAS H10 is available for order immediately, with the H20 available in May 2024. For more information, please contact iXsystems to discuss the right solution for your storage needs.

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This repeated recognition was made possible by TrueNAS Enterprise customers investing their time to share their experiences on Gartner Peer Insights™. Our focus is to make our users and customers successful. Not only are we encouraged to see TrueNAS Enterprise improve already high ratings, we’re also grateful for our Enterprise community whose shared experiences led to this recognition.

Among the 79 Gartner Peer Insights reviews for TrueNAS Enterprise in 2023, 85% of them received a full five stars while the remaining 15% received four out of five stars. This puts TrueNAS Enterprise’s overall rating at 4.9 out of 5.0 stars! And when it comes to specific aspects, like Product Capabilities, Deployment Experience, Support Experience, and Sales Experience, we’ve maintained impressive ratings of 4.9 and 4.8 stars. The full report can be accessed at https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/4304999 (Gartner Subscription Required).

As a universal data platform, TrueNAS Enterprise earns top-ratings for multiple storage categories. We look forward to competing in the Primary Storage category for years to come, aiming to secure a GPI Customers’ Choice three-peat in 2025. We also look forward to making a strong debut in the forthcoming Voice of the Customer Report for “Distributed File Systems and Object Storage” later in 2024.

For Primary Storage, TrueNAS Enterprise once again received higher scores than Dell EMC, HPE, and NetApp offerings. Unlike in 2023, Pure Storage did not receive a Customers’ Choice award in any category for 2024. While some of the comparable products in the Primary Storage category offer only block storage, TrueNAS is a universal data platform that gives customers choice of block, file, and object storage interfaces as well as applications.

According to one customer review, “The switch to TrueNAS was unbelievably easy and overall, I wished it happened sooner. Simple and straightforward experience. We were able to go in with requirements and know quickly if the solution offered was going to be able to meet our requirements. A lot of options are available out of the box that comparable products charge for.”

Another customer review noted TrueNAS Enterprise to be “Simple, Fast, And Productive. Communications were clear and concise. Getting the correct solution was simple and did not involve upsells to unneeded products. The responsiveness of the interfaces make it a breeze to make changes or review system configurations. Most configurations are easy to perform.”

Thank you again to all the customers who made this recognition possible. We invite all to read more about this Gartner award here and see what other customers are saying about their TrueNAS Enterprise experiences on Gartner Peer Insights.

Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Primary Storage, Peer Contributors, 23, February 2024. Gartner and Peer Insights are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Top Forums Post: How to Get Started with Jellyfin on TrueNAS SCALE

For the growing number of you in the TrueNAS Community who have migrated to or installed TrueNAS SCALE, our new Linux-based version of TrueNAS, there’s an easy way to set up a Jellyfin server with just a few clicks.

Top TrueNAS Video of 2023: Mark Rober! I Built You a Computer! By Linus TechTips

Linus Tech Tips gives Mark Rober’s data storage setup a massive upgrade in this video. Solving the problems of physical space, no backup, and less-than-optimized editing workflows, Mark gets an upgrade powered by TrueNAS SCALE.

TrueNAS Named Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice

TrueNAS Enterprise now stands with a 4.9/5 star rating on Gartner Peer Insights. Based on verified customer reviews, this award recognizes TrueNAS Enterprise for its reliability and customer satisfaction with a 4.8 out of 5-star customer rating, outscoring Dell EMC, HP, and NetApp.

Latest Editions of TrueNAS 13.0

TrueNAS CORE 13.0-U6.1 was released at the end of 2023, serving as the anticipated final release in the 13.0 series before the major 13.1 update. This release provides fixes to bugs dealing with Apps and Pool building and is the recommended release for both CORE and Enterprise users.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 “Cobia” has Arrived!

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 “Cobia” arrived on October 24th. This release marks a major milestone with significant improvements in SMB features, file copying, security, and more. Other highlights include infrastructure enhancements, Linux Kernel 6.1, improved hardware support, NVIDIA driver updates, and the ability to scale up to 1200 drives and 25 PB+ on a single system!

Honorable Mentions

• Meet the First Rack-Mountable TrueNAS Mini
• Viz Media gets “Anime-zing” Upgrade with TrueNAS Enterprise
• Adaptive Technical Delivers Managed IT with TrueNAS Enterprise

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Like other TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, the TrueNAS F-Series supports file, block, and object protocols and provides all the rich OpenZFS data management capabilities. All appliances can be provided with iXsystems’ award-winning enterprise support.

The TrueNAS F-Series has two models to choose from:

• F100 – Up to 24 NVMe Gen4 SSDs per 2U system for 720TB, up to 30GB/s bandwidth per node with 6x 40/100 GbE optical NICs, 800W typical power draw
• F60 – Up to 24 NVMe Gen4 SSDs per 2U system for 720TB, up to 20GB/s bandwidth per node with 4x 40/100 GbE optical NICs, 800W typical power draw

The new F-Series models are ideal for data-intensive use cases, including AI/ML, containerization, content creation, database servers, gaming, virtualization, and more. The new series has been eagerly awaited by TrueNAS Enterprise customers in government, healthcare, service providers, media creation, higher education, and other organizations in need of high-performance storage for their critical data.

TrueNAS F-Series appliances ship with the latest version of TrueNAS software, TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10. These all-NVMe models were designed for maximum performance, reliability, and density to serve the most demanding workloads. Compared to prior models from iX, the F-Series offers significant reductions in all-flash power, space, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

The next-generation hardware design supports up to 24 dual-ported Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.  With 30TB NVMe drives, a single 2U system can support up to 720TB of highly available storage.  A companion NVMe expansion shelf support arrives later in 2024 which will enable the F-Series to scale beyond 3.5PB.

TrueNAS F-Series Storage Highlights:

• High-Performance: NVMe-powered storage for low latency and bandwidths up to 30GB/s reads.
• High Availability: Dual-controller architecture provides continuous accessibility, preventing data downtime.
• Superior Scalability: The F-Series easily scales from tens of terabytes to 720TB in 2U, meeting a wide range of user requirements.
• Maximum Data Mobility: The TrueNAS F-Series provides a vast array of replication and data mobility options to maximize flexibility in data workflows.
• Future-Ready Design: Built for modern business applications and related performance challenges.

The New TrueNAS Enterprise Portfolio

TrueNAS appliances deliver unified storage and apps in a pre-configured system with technical support services from iX that have earned among the highest net-promoter scores in the industry, as scored by iX customers. These appliances offer additional software capabilities such as High Availability (HA), enclosure management, advanced security, and proactive support. TrueNAS Enterprise appliances have earned 4.9 / 5.0 stars and recognition as a 2023 Customer Choice for Primary Storage in North America from businesses of all sizes on Gartner Peer Insights.

The TrueNAS M-Series remains the versatile and high-capacity system for hybrid flash and HDD requirements in the portfolio. The M-Series and F-Series systems both run the same TrueNAS Enterprise 23.10 software with compatible features and a common WebUI. All TrueNAS systems can be monitored and managed as a fleet using TrueCommand. TrueNAS Enterprise F-Series appliances start at $60,000 with dual controllers and 1 year Bronze Support. All models are available immediately. For more information, please contact iX.

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The 11th annual OpenZFS Developer Summit for 2023 started today Monday, October 16th in San Francisco. Among the very exciting projects being developed, two of these projects have significant contributions and investments from iXsystems.

Fast Dedup is on the Horizon

One of the primary issues with traditional dedup with ZFS has been the need to keep the dedup tables in memory at all times to avoid massive performance penalties. This existing functionality was not very performant and led to usability issues during operation. With the update for Fast Dedup, the size of metadata is now constrained to fit in either RAM or flash to avoid hitting the performance penalty wall. The metadata structure for Fast Dedup has been completely re-engineered to enable efficient updates as well as the ability to evict non-dedup blocks. Combining metadata improvements with properly configured storage will improve dedup performance by an order of magnitude for larger systems.

Allan Jude will be presenting on the new Fast Dedup project for which iX has been the major sponsor. Together with engineers from iX, we’ve designed a completely new model for dedup which focuses on performance.

This Fast Dedup project started earlier this year and has been making tremendously rapid progress. We are working to ensure it will have the quality needed to be included in OpenZFS 2.3.

RAIDZ Expansion is Entering its Final QA cycle

RAIDZ expansion allows a small pool with as few as two drives to be gradually expanded with one drive at a time. Existing data is preserved with its original parity and the administrative process for small systems has been simplified. New data is written with the new parity. The same technology works for Z1, Z2 or Z3.

Don Brady and Matt Ahrens will be presenting the latest on RAIDZ expansion. Matt developed the initial software and Don, representing iX, has been completing this herculean task. This project has taken a few years but is now entering the final stretch and will be included in OpenZFS 2.3.

OpenZFS 2.2 is in TrueNAS SCALE 23.10

OpenZFS 2.2 is the current release and has been integrated into TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 (“Cobia”). The Cobia RC.1 version (which includes dRAID) has been successfully provided to the community with over 3,000 testers and the formal release planned in the coming weeks.

In early 2024, TrueNAS CORE 13.1 will be released with  OpenZFS 2.2. TrueNAS Enterprise appliances will also use OpenZFS 2.2 in its respective software versions.

OpenZFS 2.3 (or potentially 3.0) will take most of the next 12 months to mature and reach release quality and status. These RAIDZ expansion and Fast Dedup features will be integrated with TrueNAS then. Early availability via Nightlies and BETA software is expected in mid-2024 for TrueNAS SCALE.

Want to learn more about TrueNAS solutions in your business? Contact us to speak to a product specialist.

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In the roughly 30 years since networked storage emerged, organizations have complained about — and surrendered to — the limits and complexities associated with moving data and how they slow down operations. Organizations want more agility, yet many continue to deploy networked storage in proprietary silos with restrictions. TrueNAS has always offered many choices for moving data, and now there is a new official app that allows Enterprise File Sync, known as Syncthing, in the Enterprise Train for TrueNAS SCALE.

File Sync Enables New Workflows

Organizations of all sizes need data mobility’s flexibility to keep data synced between geographically distributed systems. Whether you need off-site backups or the ability to migrate data between systems within data centers, TrueNAS has several choices among built-in tools for replicating data. While many have frequently used ZFS replication, rsync, and cloudsync to manage data transfers, these tools were not designed for multi-site file sync needs. That’s where Enterprise File Sync with syncthing comes in.

Many organizations have multiple buildings or remote sites that house content and software development, and users want to collaborate and share this critical data. But where should the data be located for the best user experience and productivity? TrueNAS Enterprise File Sync allows data to be present on systems at multiple sites worldwide while providing concurrent read and write access to each system. File updates to one system are automatically synced across all systems, with the only constraint being the bandwidth between the systems.

Media production companies require large assets to be quickly accessible to editors and related applications, and public clouds are too slow and not up to the task. With Enterprise file sync, media can be hosted on all-flash systems for fast editing and simultaneously synced to a hard drive-based archive for long-term storage. Where necessary, the same files can be quickly and directly accessed via local systems, greatly accelerating and simplifying these workflows.

A simple deployment example is a single pair of sites and systems that can constantly provide SMB or NFS read and write access. This enables backup, disaster recovery, and application acceleration in a simple configuration.

Enterprise File Sync, Syncthing, and Kastelo

Enterprise File Sync is the requirement, and the Syncthing App is the software that helps deliver these capabilities. Syncthing can be deployed as an Enterprise App on a TrueNAS system* and configured to perform file sync, migration, and replication tasks.

* Syncthing is more robust on TrueNAS SCALE than TrueNAS CORE because Linux provides a more reliable file change notification process.

Syncthing monitors the OpenZFS file system for file changes and provides several key features:

• File changes are queued up after the files are closed
• Replication is as fast as bandwidth allows (nearsync)
• Only changes in files require replication
• Deduplication of data across files reduces the data to be transferred
• Multi-site replication is intelligently scheduled
• Competing file changes are flagged and versioned
• The status of the file sync process is monitored and displayed
• Network and node outages are managed without intervention
• Both SMB and NFS datasets can be synced with file metadata
• Windows and MacOS hosts can also be synced

The developer of Syncthing is an Open Source-focused company called Kastelo, based in Sweden. Kastelo and iXsystems have collaborated to enhance Syncthing to include additional capabilities, such as the synchronization of TrueNAS file metadata (NFSv4 ACLs, permissions) and the files. There is more ability and data freedom to come, including TrueNAS SCALE Cobia, which also reached its BETA release this week and will include additional cross-vendor file sync capabilities.

The Syncthing App can be installed on your TrueNAS SCALE system from the Apps page by searching for it under Available Applications.

To ensure that you’re installing Syncthing for Enterprise File Sync, or if you only see the “Charts” version, you can use the Manage Catalogs tab to edit and enable the Enterprise application train.

Start Syncing Files

The Syncthing app for Enterprise File Sync on TrueNAS SCALE is available today, having undergone extensive testing on SCALE 22.12 internally and in thousands of external deployments. Once you try the Syncthing app, we bet that you will agree that Kastelo has developed a very cool and useful technology. If you use Syncthing, please join iX in donating to the open source project to show your appreciation.

You are invited to test our new Enterprise File Sync functionality with Syncthing, use its capabilities for less critical use cases, and stand up an additional system for replication or synchronization for free. We recommend starting with TrueNAS SCALE 22.12 and viewing the video guide and documentation for additional support.

If you have not yet configured a TrueNAS SCALE system, check out the SCALE Evaluation Guide. The written guide with accompanying videos was designed to get you up and running on your hardware in under an hour to experience the benefits of True Data Freedom.

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Thanks to a collaboration between iX and the Storj network, a secure, high-performance solution now exists for cloud storage with the unbeatable economics TrueNAS users enjoy today.

iX-Storj is a globally distributed storage solution, with over 11 nines of durability, at a cost significantly lower than competing cloud-based archive solutions. Data is securely encrypted before being distributed to a worldwide network with tens of thousands of storage nodes. With support for the Amazon S3 API, you can access your data on Storj using a number of compatible software solutions.

Getting started with iX-Storj from your TrueNAS system couldn’t be simpler. All versions of TrueNAS have iX-Storj built in, with native support for synchronizing your files through the Cloud Sync Tasks panel. You can use iX-Storj in your home or business to provide secure, off-site backup at a fraction of the cost of comparable cloud hyper-scaling services.

The World is Your Data Archive

Unlike other cloud services, you don’t have to worry about different costs for storage or network traffic based on where in the world you’re storing the data. Storj offers one single data region across the entire world while still offering downloads from nodes close to you to ensure that you’ll get the fastest transfer speeds possible.

With the iX-Storj Starter Package, you get 5 TB of capacity to use and 5 TB of pre-paid annual transfer bandwidth for outbound traffic from the Storj network, giving you a $275 value for only $150. When comparing this cost to major cloud storage providers for comparable “instant access” data tiers, Storj offers over a 10x cost reduction.

5 TB of Cloud Storage / 1 Year

Even when compared to value-based services, Storj’s globally distributed storage network offers a lower cost-per-TB, and when combined with the value in the iX-Storj Starter Package, you can protect your data for less than half the cost. Other providers like Wasabi only use a single data center for a bucket which limits reliability. The Web3 technology of iX-Storj is significantly lower in cost and more reliable.

5 TB of Cloud Storage / 1 Year

Because iX-Storj is built into TrueNAS, all that’s needed once you’re signed up is to add your credentials, enable the Storj functionality, and select the data to synchronize. With no expensive licensing fees and no lock-in to the ecosystem, TrueNAS storage appliances provide twice the value at half the cost of other popular vendors as reported by ESG.

Get Started Today

To get started, simply navigate to the registration portal at ix.storj.io. You can also find this same link in the TrueNAS UI when adding cloud credentials. You’ll be directed to the Storj registration portal for your nearest region and asked to enter your name, email address, and a password. After verifying your email address, you’ll be prompted to select from one of three accounts. You can start with a 30 day free trial with 25GB of space and bandwidth, a Pro account, or the iX-Storj Starter Package.

With a Pro account, you “pay as you grow” only for what is used, at $4/TB/mo for storage. Downloading from the Storj network is priced at $7/TB, with uploads to the network free of charge. “Pay as you grow” with large-scale public clouds is five to ten times more expensive.

With the exclusive iX-Storj Starter Package, TrueNAS users get a special opportunity to save even more. Pay up front for one year of Storj, and store up to 5 TB of data with 5 TB of download bandwidth for only $150, a $125 discount over the Pro Account. Starter Package users that grow beyond 5 TB pay the same rates as Pro users for additional capacity or outbound network traffic.

Once you’ve got your iX-Storj account registered, this 7-minute video contains all of the steps needed to start using iX-Storj Globally Distributed Storage with TrueNAS. You can also view written instructions on the TrueNAS Community Forums. TrueNAS SCALE users can also monetize their spare capacity by joining as a Storj storage node within the global network. 

If you’re already a Storj user, or are interested in learning more about Globally Distributed Storage, why not check out our iX-Storj Community Giveaway? Learn about the advantages of the Storj network and protect your data while entering for a chance to win fantastic prizes, including the latest member of the Mini family, the TrueNAS Mini R.

Cloud storage doesn’t have to be expensive, complicated, or closed. Thanks to the partnership between iX and Storj, you can keep enjoying the same True Data Freedom that TrueNAS provides, while adding in the resilience, durability, and availability of Storj’s Globally Distributed Storage.

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TrueNAS 13.0 includes significant new components and delivers improved performance, scalability, and reliability when compared to the previous major version, TrueNAS 12.0. To date, over 75% of TrueNAS 12.0 users have updated to TrueNAS 13.0, including many of our larger enterprise customers. In particular, the increased speed and robustness of HA failover is extremely valuable for most Enterprise use-cases.  Version 12.0 is no longer available for TrueNAS Enterprise, and is no longer recommended for deployment.

One strong quality indicator of TrueNAS 13.0 is that there are fewer than 10 bug fixes and improvements currently planned for 13.0-U6. We recommend that all TrueNAS 12.0 and TrueNAS 11.3 users update their systems to TrueNAS 13.0 before attempting to resolve any software or performance issues.

In the last month, there has been news on the process for maintaining and updating TrueNAS CORE Plugins. Users of Plugins are recommended to review this new information.

When Should you update your TrueNAS system?

Our recommendations are maintained and updated regularly on our Software Status page, which currently recommends TrueNAS 13.0-U4 for all users and customers for stability and security reasons. As TrueNAS 13.0-U5 receives further testing in more customer environments, it will become the recommended release for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users within two months.

TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations who prefer a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, professional support, and Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP).

TrueNAS Enterprise users will have the option to sidegrade to TrueNAS (SCALE) Enterprise 22.12 and other SCALE-based releases. Currently, these sidegrades are only recommended for new use-cases that specifically require the unique functionality of TrueNAS SCALE. The sidegrade process will continue to be simplified and made more robust.

TrueNAS Enterprise customers are encouraged to contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating from 12.0.

If you ever need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you.

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For nearly a decade, TrueNAS has provided rapid, reliable storage for customers using virtualization technology. From small startups to the majority of Fortune 500 companies, organizations everywhere have experienced the benefits of True Data Freedom, and each TrueNAS release continues to refine, polish, and deliver high-quality user experiences. With over 15 million downloads across the CORE and SCALE products, TrueNAS offers storage for virtualization solutions that will keep your machines running smoothly.

TrueNAS as a Storage Server for VMware/Hyper-V

As a unified storage provider, TrueNAS offers file, block, and object protocols, making it an ideal component of your VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, XenServer, or KVM-based virtualization solution. TrueNAS CORE and SCALE offer hypervisor storage over the NFS and iSCSI protocols, and TrueNAS Enterprise extends this feature set by adding support for up to 32 Gbps Fibre Channel and dual-controller High-Availability, bringing your storage uptime into the 99.999% of availability. With TrueNAS, you can experience the benefits of virtualization in its most efficient state.

TrueNAS offers advanced read caching using the OpenZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache to serve up your most important and in-demand data at the fastest speed possible from system memory. Data writes are accelerated by the use of high-performance, solid-state devices or non-volatile memory, providing sub-millisecond latency even under heavy workloads.

High-performance storage is critical to a successful virtualization infrastructure, and TrueNAS delivers just that with the OpenZFS file system. With TrueNAS, your virtualization benefits from best-in-class data integrity guaranteed, with self-healing behavior to automatically detect and repair silent data corruption. OpenZFS was specifically designed to ensure the integrity of data. It uses features like end-to-end checksumming and copy-on-write to protect data against the silent data corruption caused by everything from bit rot to current spikes, driver and disk errors, accidental overwrites, and more.

TrueNAS also helps to protect your data against the new generation of hypervisor-based ransomware through immutable OpenZFS snapshots, creating stable local or remote restore points. With its dynamic caching and storage optimization technology, TrueNAS eliminates the need to rely on multiple hard drives to get the IOPS needed for a VM deployment. No other file system, volume manager, or hardware RAID solution provides sufficient protection against such problems.

The Open Source economics of TrueNAS lets you choose the solution that best fits your company. TrueNAS Enterprise hardware scales from 10TB up to 20PB of capacity and is offered with economical hybrid performance or powerful all-flash NVMe.

TrueNAS can be downloaded and deployed for free in your environment. TrueNAS is VMware Ready certified and offers unified and scalable storage solutions to protect data, simplify its management, reduce operational costs, and optimize the performance of a virtualized environment. There is no need for proprietary hardware or software to see how your virtual environment can benefit from True Data Freedom.

For more information on TrueNAS for VMware, check out the TrueNAS for VMware Whitepaper.

Keep your virtualization solutions running smoothly. Download TrueNAS SCALE

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Compared to TrueNAS 12.0, TrueNAS 13.0 includes significant new components and delivers improved performance, scalability, and reliability. To date, nearly 50% of TrueNAS users have updated to TrueNAS 13.0, including many of our larger enterprise customers.

Today, TrueNAS 13.0 is the default software to ship on most TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, and it is recommended for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users by virtue of its improved security and reliability characteristics, compared to TrueNAS 12.0 and previous versions. The TrueNAS 13.0-U4 version includes about 60 new bug fixes and updates to OpenZFS and SAMBA.

When Should you update your TrueNAS system?

Our recommendations are maintained and updated regularly on our Software Status page, which currently recommends TrueNAS 13.0-U3.1 for all users and customers. As TrueNAS 13.0-U4 receives further testing in more customer environments, it will become the recommended release for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users within two months.

TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations who prefer a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, professional support, and Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP).

TrueNAS Enterprise customers are encouraged to contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating.

If you ever need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you.

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In 2009, iX became the sponsor and manager of the FreeNAS project, which today is known as TrueNAS. TrueNAS is Open Storage software that protects and manages Exabytes of data in over 200 countries. Due to the significant costs of commercial storage solutions, much of this data would otherwise go unprotected without a free Open Storage option. TrueNAS topples this economic barrier, and the millions of  TrueNAS users have made it the world’s most deployed storage software, accessing billions in value each year at no cost to those users.

The critical role that software plays in addressing the world’s most pressing challenges is universally  recognized. As a result, a movement has grown to consider certain software as a Digital Public Good (DPG). A DPG is defined as open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They are resources or services that are freely accessible to all and provide benefits that are essential for individuals and society as a whole.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) is a multi-stakeholder initiative facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods. In alignment with the DPGA’s mission, TrueNAS is freely available to all, including those who are otherwise unable to invest in traditional storage offerings to protect valuable data. DPGs like TrueNAS represent much more than code itself and are key to accelerating the attainment of sustainable development goals in emerging economic regions.

The only way customers can truly free their data from proprietary limitations and high cost is through Open Storage. Much like how Linux and other Open Source software are now standard in every corner of datacenter infrastructure, Open Storage now is a viable option for solving data growth and supporting innovation. TrueNAS delivers the benefits of software-defined storage with the added freedom and economics of Open Source, allowing organizations to spend less money and keep more valuable data.

TrueNAS is a software solution that is changing the way data is stored and managed. Its recognition as a digital public good highlights its significance in today’s digital world, where data protection, security, and privacy are top concerns for many. With its high level of data security and privacy, versatility, and augmented quality from community testing, TrueNAS is a reliable and secure option for data storage for individuals, businesses, and organizations of all sizes. The TrueNAS Community then adds to that software value with its expert advice and support.

In 2022, iX also introduced Linux-based TrueNAS SCALE to the TrueNAS family. Like the previous edition of TrueNAS, it is also freely-available, Open Source, and based on the highly-regarded OpenZFS file system. This new edition also adds Kubernetes, virtualization, and clustering. TrueNAS continues to grow in value as a DPG with hyperconvergence and scale-out capabilities.

Brett Davis, our fourth employee in 2004 and today, our Executive Vice President, shared this message on the DPGA recognition:

“Our core purpose as a company is to spread the benefits of True Data Freedom to the world and earn the opportunity to provide organizations with TrueNAS Enterprise solutions as an alternative to traditional commercial storage systems that are proprietary, restrictive, and often overpriced.”

As iXians, we gratefully accept the recognition of TrueNAS as a DPG from the DPGA, but we did not do it by ourselves. We are even more grateful for the contributions that members of the TrueNAS Community have made and continue to offer for the good of the project. We hope that the Community will share in the pride of this recognition and in our vision for Open Storage, helping lower the barriers to digital innovation in nearly every country on the planet.

Experience True Data Freedom for yourself by visiting https://www.truenas.com/compare/ and downloading TrueNAS today.

The post TrueNAS Delivers Billions in Value as a Digital Public Good appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Compared to TrueNAS 12, TrueNAS 13 includes significant new components and has improved performance, scalability, and reliability in subsequent releases. In the two months since TrueNAS 13.0-U2 was released, it has already become the 2nd most deployed version of TrueNAS. TrueNAS 13.0-U3 builds on the maturity of the prior version with 30 bug fixes and security updates. It also includes enclosure management updates for the TrueNAS R50 Gen3, which was announced two weeks ago.

To date, more than 25% of TrueNAS users have updated to TrueNAS 13, including many of our largest enterprise customers. Today TrueNAS 13.0-U2 is the default software used for all TrueNAS appliances, and it is recommended for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users by virtue of its improved security and reliability characteristics compared to TrueNAS 12.0-U8 and previous versions.

Globally Distributed Storage with TrueNAS 13

First announced in September 2022, TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise systems can now use the iX-Storj service with TrueNAS 13.0-U3. Key benefits of iX-Storj over AWS S3 include:

• 80% LowerCost – The iX-Storj service is $4 per TB per month* compared with single-region AWS S3 at $25 per TB per month. For the same price, store 5X the data with iX-Storj with the added value of multi-region durability.

• Double the Bandwidth – The iX-Storj service leverages the aggregated bandwidth capabilities of globally distributed storage. Read and Write bandwidth of GigaBytes per second is possible from a well-connected data center. Performance is typically more than double that of AWS S3.
• 11 Nines of Durability – This is extremely high durability and suitable for both backup and long-term archive applications, much like AWS S3. If the data is also stored on a TrueNAS system, the durability is orders of magnitude higher than single-region AWS S3.

The first 150GB of storage is free and can be used for testing, as well as  backup for key documents and files. Please note that only iX-Storj accounts can use the TrueNAS service and not regular Storj accounts. 

Users eager to test and evaluate the iX-Storj service can download TrueNAS 13.0-U3, and follow the remaining steps outlined in this blog. For more information, check out the discussion on our Community Forums.

What About Apps and Plugins?

While TrueNAS 13.0 is performing very well for storage use cases and jails, the benefits of using TrueNAS SCALE for Apps and Clustering is becoming more and more apparent. Kubernetes / Docker Apps are better supported by the broader community and therefore provide a better user experience than Plugins, with a much broader selection of 3rd Party Applications to choose from. 

Over the next few months, iX will begin encouraging new users to adopt SCALE for most use cases where 3rd party software will be deployed and run directly on the TrueNAS system. 

When Should you update your TrueNAS system?

Ultimately “it depends”, and we base our recommendations on how and where the software is being used. 

Our recommendations are maintained and updated regularly on our Software Status page, which currently recommends TrueNAS 13.0-U2 for all users and customers. You can expect that as TrueNAS 13.0-U3 receives further testing in more complex environments, it will become the recommended release for all CORE and Enterprise users before the end of 2022.

TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations that want a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, professional support, and Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP). Results show TrueNAS 13.0 delivers a significant reduction (>95% in some cases) in failover times. 

TrueNAS Enterprise customers should contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating.

If you ever need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you.

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• Modular architecture with easy-to-replace controller
• Over 1PB HDD capacity in 4U
• Up to 60TB of NVMe flash and 12GB/s
• Super-flexible, high-speed networking
• TrueNAS SCALE clustering and enclosure management
• Fits in an industry standard one meter rack

Let’s dive into the details of the Gen3 TrueNAS R50 and why we are excited about it.

Modular Architecture: The new R50 chassis has been custom designed with a modular controller for easier servicing. The drive drawer at the front can accept 48 top-loaded disk drives with an internal cable management arm that makes it easy to pull out and swap drives. The storage controller at the rear is removable so that it can be serviced without unracking such a large system. Unlike the numerous other high-density storage servers (e.g. 45Drives), you can upgrade or replace the controller with ease. This significantly extends the life of the system.

Petabyte Capacity: With 22TB disk drives, the new R50 can provide over 1PB of raw storage. This capacity can scale up to 5PB with two 102-bay expansion shelves. This storage is then managed with ZFS configured with single, dual, or triple parity. Lower-capacity drives starting at 4TB are also supported for workloads with more IOPS and less capacity. These 22TB drives use the latest OptiNAND technology from Western Digital for increased performance.

Extreme NVMe Acceleration: The new R50 is extended to support four full NVMe drives, each of which can range up to 15TB. These drives can be used for caching or storage and are hot-swappable. L2ARC, SLOG, and special VDEVs can be configured or used for a dedicated all-flash pool. Database applications and deduplication tables can benefit from this incredibly fast storage.

Flexible Networking: Many user environments are going through the transition from 10GbE to 25GbE and then 100GbE.  The new R50 makes it easier to upgrade the controllers from 10GBase-T all the way to 25/40/100GbE optical through the easy-to-upgrade modular controller.

Scale-out Clustering: With TrueNAS SCALE on the R50, there is now an option to cluster these units for SMB file or S3 object services. A rack of eight R50 systems can support 8PB of HDD capacity and 480TB of NVMe flash over 1.6 Terabits/s of switched infrastructure. This is ideal for high-performing video editing and storage, or extreme analytics. If you need more capacity, you can add more racks of R50s to scale out.

With all the improvements made in Gen3, the price of the TrueNAS R50 remains the same. All new orders of the TrueNAS R50 will automatically be upgraded to the Gen3 modular version. For use-cases that need more capacity or flexibility, the Gen3 version offers more configuration choices. The new TrueNAS R50 has already begun shipping.

The TrueNAS R-Series datasheet includes the updated R50 specs. The system fits in a 1-meter-deep industry-standard rack and does not require an external cable management arm. The typical power draw is under 800W for 1PB.

The TrueNAS R50 is just one of the many TrueNAS Enterprise platform choices. Shown below in the middle of the back row, R50 Gen3 is ideal for mid-size deployments and clustering. For High Availability (HA) and larger systems, the TrueNAS M-Series is recommended and scales to over 25PB per system. For small deployments, the 2U TrueNAS R20 is recommended.

For more information on this or other TrueNAS appliances or our software, please contact iX.

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We’re just getting started, but a tremendous thanks goes out to our incredible customer base for taking the time to share their TrueNAS experience with Gartner and the world.

As the list’s only open source solution offering True Data Freedom, we also could not be happier to be the only vendor with 100% of reviewers stating they would recommend iX and TrueNAS. What’s more, reviewers reported they considered the “who’s who” of classic storage vendors in the market before selecting TrueNAS Enterprise. Nearly 4 in 5 considered Dell, and more than half considered HPE and NetApp, and were clearly very satisfied with their choices.

Products from these companies make up half of the top 20 list in the Primary Storage category. According to the reviews, iX outscores Dell, HPE, and NetApp, with these cited advantages:

• Better at service and support
  • Enterprise support from US-based engineers
• Easier to integrate and deploy
  • One common software,  UX, and learning curve that can cover all storage tiers vs. different solutions for each tier or application (i.e. – Dell: PowerStore, Unity, VMAX, Isilon, and the list goes on and on)
• Better evaluation and contracting
  • Fast and free to evaluate, fundamentally lower in cost

While iX is not yet as large of a company as these vendors, many of our customers are. 34% of customer reviews came from large or very large organizations, and 35% from medium-sized ones. Organizations of all sizes are choosing TrueNAS Enterprise for their data storage needs, evidence that Open Source Economics are important in smaller deployments and even more valuable in larger ones.

From a recent piece of research from Gartner published last month, Open Source software [OSS] is used within mission-critical IT workloads by more than 95% of IT organizations worldwide, whether they are aware of it or not. Among the key findings, IT organizations leverage OSS to gain cost savings, flexibility and innovation benefits over homegrown or third-party commercial alternatives.

We invite you to check out all Gartner Peer Insights reviews, as well as other user experiences on our updated TrueNAS reviews page. For customers who invested their time in sharing their experiences, we thank you! Thank you in advance to customers who consider sharing your experiences on any review site, to keep the momentum growing for the Open Storage Era!

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Constructive User Input

• Please keep TrueNAS CORE free!
• Applications like a file manager and activity log reviewer would be helpful.
• Can you provide better consumer cloud integration options?
• I wish there were more applications integrated into the platform
• GPU passthrough to VMs is a must for some workloads. Please allow more flexibility with hardware and SCALE.
• Please provide better guides or documentation for what everything does for people who are new to the NAS community.

Getting Involved

Want to get involved and have your feedback heard? Join our Community Forums and chat about all the things you’d like to see in TrueNAS. You can submit feature requests and bug requests here on our Jira tracker. You can also look to see if there is a similar ticket in Jira with the built-in search functionality. Lastly, you can vote on issues you would like to see implemented in TrueNAS!

Feedback and iteration are two of the most important components of any new technology or product. Build something for someone to use, listen to them, improve the product, repeat ad-infinitum. FreeNAS and TrueNAS have gone through many of these feedback loops (more efficiently than any comparable proprietary products, a feature of open source) to reach where we are today.

User Comments

• “We have used FreeNAS/TrueNAS for 6 years in our company. We have found it to be efficient, reliable, and economical. I am glad I discovered it and have been able to incorporate it into the IT structures in our business.”
• “TrueNAS saved my life—August 2021, my client was on fire. Two months before, I made a disaster recovery plan with TrueNAS. All the data was saved – thanks to FreeBSD, ZFS, rsync, and TrueNAS!!!!”
• “Keep up the good work! TrueNAS has replaced my 15 year old Gentoo install. Using VMs, containers, and built-in services. Thank you so much.”
• “Thank you all for your hard work. TrueNAS as a whole is amazing for a large number of use cases. Moved from ESXi and a self-configured NAS to just using TrueNAS SCALE for both service hosting, VM hosting, and as a NAS. And it’s awesome how it holds up to everything.”
• “Keep it up! I can’t wait for when I have some more time to try out more features on my newly acquired test server! Definitely looking forward to an alternative to VMware’s vSAN!”
• I have spent my career in IT leadership, managing global networks, infrastructure, and operations. When a need arose for network storage on a less than multi-million dollar budget, I started researching solutions and decided to give TrueNAS a try…I was pleasantly surprised! I was impressed with the ease of installation, robustness, and reliability of the TrueNAS product. Thank you!”
• “Everything is progressing really well, iXsystems got me started in servers and ZFS and now I couldn’t imagine life without it. Thanks for all the hard work over the years.”

Do You Know TrueCommand?

We also found that almost 90% of users have yet to try TrueCommand, with nearly a third of those users simply not yet aware of what TrueCommand is used for. For the uninitiated, TrueCommand is a management dashboard designed for easy monitoring and management of TrueNAS systems and drives, as well as the cluster manager for TrueNAS SCALE. 

While many users have small environments, TrueCommand is available to manage up to 50 drives for free. Given TrueCommand is meant for managing Enterprise environments, it makes sense it has fewer users overall in our community. Among those who have used TrueCommand, most are satisfied with its performance, so we hope you take the time to test it out! 

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

As a whole, the numbers show that 93% of all free TrueNAS users (CORE and SCALE) actively recommend the software. With over one million deployments worldwide, that means there are hundreds of thousands of happy users. We’re proud that so many of our users are already advocates of TrueNAS. It speaks to the quality of our free software and the influence of our community. 

With a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 64.8, we are pleased to be in the “great” category, within striking distance of 71 and a coveted “excellent” score range. As our community grows, iX is growing to support continued engineering and continued improvement in user experience. Speaking of growth, iX is also a most excellent place to work. Are you an iXian?

Thank You Again!

As mentioned in Part 1, one of our core values is “pursue kaizen”, another way of saying “continuous improvement”. It is something we apply both to our products and ourselves. Another big thanks to our users for sharing their comments and feedback. We gained a lot of insight into our community and how we can improve TrueNAS for our users.

The post TrueNAS 2022 User Satisfaction Survey Comments – Part 2 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

In our continuous effort to improve and reach new heights, we recently asked our community to give us feedback about their experience with TrueNAS. The results are in! Nearly 8,400 users stepped up and responded to our recent survey to provide their thoughts and give us insight into what TrueNAS means to them.

More than 4 out of 5 Users Agree

First and foremost, we are very pleased to learn that nearly 90% of respondents have already upgraded from FreeNAS to TrueNAS. TrueNAS CORE code was first made available over two and a half years ago in 2019, and the vast majority of users are now taking advantage of the maturity and features available.

Overall, the community had very positive feedback. Across the board, the scores show that more than 4 out of every 5 users are highly satisfied with their TrueNAS experience. We are delighted that our hard work over many years has earned such high marks, and will continue to pour our passions into developing offerings that users love.

TrueNAS CORE

TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U8 is the most widely deployed and highest quality of the current TrueNAS releases. On a 10-point scale, nearly 85% reported they are highly satisfied with their experience with TrueNAS CORE.

Even more encouraging, nearly nine out of ten would be confident using TrueNAS CORE at work. This should inspire confidence in the even the most ultra-conservative IT Admins that TrueNAS in 2022 is proving itself robust enough for many demanding applications.

If you’re happy with TrueNAS CORE, you’ll find even greater satisfaction with TrueNAS Enterprise which is built on the same foundation as CORE and designed especially for zero-downtime environments that need the added security provided by professional support. 

For the ~10% of those who haven’t upgraded to TrueNAS CORE from FreeNAS, many of the responses mentioned that they didn’t want to risk an upgrade because they “haven’t had a need” or “it just works.” These comments are very encouraging to read. It shows that the stability and maturity of older versions are still meeting the needs of these users, though there have been several security updates since, so we would still encourage those users to update when they can.  We recommend updating to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS CORE to retain rollback options. It’s an easy web update, and we’ve also made it simple to migrate from CORE and SCALE.

There’s never been a better time to make the move. TrueNAS CORE 13.0 will be coming soon and will introduce goodness from FreeBSD 13.0, OpenZFS 2.1.1, SAMBA 4.15, as well as optimizations for large systems with heavy disk usage. 

TrueNAS SCALE

At the time of this survey, TrueNAS SCALE was still in the Release Candidate stage. Despite that, the vast majority of SCALE users were also very satisfied with the quality, features, and maturity of the product. This is a strong vote of confidence in the changes we’ve made in the development, release, and QA processes over the past two years.

Over a hundred QA and development cycles took place to transform FreeNAS 11.3 to the current TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U8. Meanwhile, there have been about six development cycles so far to bring TrueNAS SCALE to its current release. Although SCALE is the newest member of the TrueNAS family, it’s built on the same data freedom fundamentals as TrueNAS CORE and inherits much of the work that went into TrueNAS CORE. 

As a result of its open development process, the platform is much more mature than users might have expected from pre-release software. We thus are happily surprised that 70% of users who primarily use TrueNAS SCALE are highly satisfied with the platform. What’s more, 4 out of 5 users would be comfortable deploying TrueNAS SCALE in an enterprise environment.

Thank You!

“The feedback from the TrueNAS community has been tremendous,” said Morgan Littlewood, iXsystems SVP for Product Development. “It’s always great to hear that users love the product because it indicates that we’re on the right path. The fundamentals of our products are strong, and that provides a great foundation for us to build the Enterprise edition of our product. We very much appreciate collaborating with the TrueNAS community, and we’ll continue to refine the product and add more useful features to make the user experience better for everyone.”

Part 2 of this topic will share the constructive comments and product feedback received in the survey. We invite all to look for Part 2 next week, as well as continuous improvements in future releases of TrueNAS as we pursue kaizen! Lastly, another big thanks to our users for participating in the survey. 

The post TrueNAS 2022 User Satisfaction Survey Results – Part 1 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Available Now!

After 11 months of testing the OpenZFS 2.0 codebase, we are very comfortable with its quality and even more enthusiastic about the performance and features it brings.
TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was made available yesterday (December 9, 2020), and with it, TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise now have OpenZFS 2.0 RELEASE included. TrueNAS SCALE 20.12 has integrated OpenZFS 2.0 RELEASE into its nightly and will be included in the official release due out next week. Complete integration of OpenZFS 2.0 RELEASE will be achieved within three weeks.

What’s the big deal with OpenZFS 2.0?

ZFS has been a big deal for over a decade and a half as an enterprise file system with unequaled data protection features. FreeNAS and TrueNAS embraced ZFS and have made it the “easy button” for ZFS for nearly 10 years, with over 1 million deployments on FreeBSD. There have been more deployments of ZFS via TrueNAS (and FreeNAS) than any other platform.

OpenZFS 2.0.0 unifies the OS support for ZFS and is thoroughly described in this Ars Technica article. One of the major contributions of iXsystems was ensuring that FreeBSD and Linux were equally well supported and synchronized in OpenZFS 2.0. The software is automatically tested and verified on both OSes, and the differences between the two OSes is limited to a small number of source code files for excellent maintainability. With this evolution, Linux-based systems can replicate to and from FreeBSD-based systems, and pools from one can also be imported by the other. This capability is the key to TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise being able to coexist with TrueNAS SCALE.
TrueNAS 12.0 has a long list of features and performance improvements, many of which are made possible by OpeZFS 2.0. Thus far, TrueNAS 12.0 has been clocked at over 1.2 Million IOPS and over 23GB/s on a TrueNAS M60 and generally showed 20-30% performance improvements on larger systems. Other OpenZFS 2.0 benefits include:

• Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file system metadata and dedupe tables.
• Fusion Pools: Special SSD vdevs (known in OpenZFS parlance as “special allocation classes”) can also be used for data based on I/O write size. This is configurable on a per dataset basis. Users can accelerate database datasets or special VMs.
• Dataset Encryption: Specific datasets can be selected or deselected for encryption with a user-provided key. When replicating the dataset to another TrueNAS, the key does not have to be provided and so the data can be transmitted and stored in the original encrypted state.
• Asynchronous Trim: Trim commands free up space, particularly within SSDs. By making these Trim commands asynchronous, they scale and perform better. This is particularly useful for deduplication of flash storage and can significantly reduce costs.
• Faster Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times.
• Persistent L2ARC: L2ARC (flash-based read cache) now survives reboots and failovers without clearing its cache, saving hours or days it formerly took to rehydrate larger cache, and allowing performance-sensitive systems to get back to full speed without delay.
• ZFS async DMU and CoW: Within the original ZFS is a Data Management Unit (DMU) and an algorithm for Copy-on-Write (CoW). These algorithms were implemented in a synchronous manner, which required a transaction to wait until another transaction was completed. iXsystems contributed to the conversion of these algorithms to an asynchronous approach, which reduces the amount of wait time and increases parallelism in OpenZFS 2.0. An added benefit is that fewer disk I/Os are needed for sequential writes. This increases drive efficiency and reduces latency in heavy workloads.
• ZFS Record Size Increases: One benefit of async CoW is that larger ZFS record sizes will perform better with fewer Read-Modify-Write activities. Instead of operating with 128KB record size, a 256KB or 512KB record size may be beneficial for some workloads. This will increase the bandwidth of many RAIDZ1/2/3 VDEVs.

Storage Freedom with TrueNAS SCALE

One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is TrueNAS SCALE. Next week we’ll release the second Beta version, TrueNAS SCALE 20.12 “Angelfish”. For most users, we recommend moving to TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0. From there, users can stay with CORE or Enterprise editions, or migrate in 2021 to SCALE for Linux services or scale-out functionality. We call this flexibility, “Storage Freedom” and an easy migration will be available in TrueNAS 12.0-U2.

TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS 11.3 still installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS CORE 12.0 RELEASE with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE to get started.
TrueNAS 12.0 can operate on all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS 12.0.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommended contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process to minimize issues. On December 22, we plan to enable the upgrades to be done from the UI.

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Bugs resolved include:

• Reporting UI: Issues with some WebUI themes causing the Reporting sections of the UI to not fully load and display data.
• SNMP Performance: SNMP usage leading to very high CPU utilization.

New features added include:

• TRIM: TRIM can now be enabled or disabled via the webUI. It improves performance with SSDs that have high quality TRIM implementations.
• Top Users: The system can report the busiest storage clients and which protocols they are using via SNMP.
• Scrub and resilver Performance: Improvements in the algorithms allow scrubbing and resilvering to have less impact on busy workloads while also completing faster.
• Fusion Pools (the ability to have SSDs and HDDs in the same pools): The webUI has added the capability to specify that small blocks are assigned to the special flash vdevs. The size of the small block is configurable.

TrueNAS System improvements include:

• • M60: The TrueNAS M60 (with up to 23GB/s and 1 Million IOPS), the ES-102 (102 bay HDD expansion), and the ES-24F (24 SSD bay expansion), and are all now shipping with visual enclosure management.

• • R-Series: Visual enclosure Management has been enabled for the TrueNAS R10, R20, R40, and R50 so that the status of drives and systems are easily viewed remotely.

• NVME Hot swap enables the high performance drives to be used as performance vdevs in Fusion pools (pools with flash vdevs and HDD vdevs). Early testing of Fusion Pools has been promising and there will be more to come later.
• Mini and X-Series systems will also benefit from all the bug fixes and new features.

Below is a graphic showing TrueNAS 12.0-U1 enclosure management of the TrueNAS R50 with 48 HDD bays. It simplifies monitoring, diagnostics, and operations of larger systems, saving hours of admin time and further preventing downtime.

TrueCommand CLOUD
TrueNAS 12.0 also includes support for TrueCommand CLOUD, a SaaS version of TrueCommand which includes a VPN capability for managing across sites. Service trials have started and are going well. We expect to make this service generally available in December at the same time as TrueNAS 12.0-U1.

TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is reaching parity with 11.3
TrueNAS 12.0 has moved to a more modern documentation style that encourages contribution. The new documentation is more modular and expandable, and is now nearly as comprehensive as that of FreeNAS 11.3. We’ll continue to improve usability once completeness is achieved. Please check out the 12.0 documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re grateful for all the contributions received thus far!

Migrating between TrueNAS 12.0-U2 and TrueNAS SCALE 20.12
One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is TrueNAS SCALE. While TrueNAS SCALE 20.10 “Angelfish” is based on 90% of the same software, SCALE is less mature but very promising. For most users, we recommend moving to TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0. From there, users can stay with CORE or Enterprise editions or migrate in 2021 to SCALE for Linux services or scale-out functionality. We call this flexibility, “Storage Freedom”. In TrueNAS 12.0-U2 we plan to automate migration to TrueNAS SCALE for those that need Kubernetes or scale-out. Like TrueNAS CORE, TrueNAS SCALE is free and Open Source.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy
For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading first to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 and then you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 with a single click and roll-back options! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 to get started.
TrueNAS 12.0 can operate on all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommended contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process to minimize issues.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the best Free NAS
TrueNAS 12.0-U1 improvements continue to make it the best Free NAS system available. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us.

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