It’s been over three years since we introduced the converged Apps feature of TrueNAS SCALE in February 2022, and deploying powerful applications on TrueNAS became even easier with the added support for industry-standard Docker powered Apps in the TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” release. With nearly 140,000 deployments in only six months, the marriage of Docker and OpenZFS has been a smash hit with the TrueNAS community.

TrueNAS 25.04 “Fangtooth” extends this App support further with configurable IP addresses, similar to the jail/plugin capability of TrueNAS CORE 13.x. Newly added Apps already have the capability, and all existing Apps will enable this functionality by June 1st. Current App users on TrueNAS 24.04 or earlier will need to migrate to TrueNAS 24.10 or later by that date to take advantage of the automated Apps migration process.

Since its release a week ago, TrueNAS 25.04 has shown a rapid uptake, with over 20,000 early adopters – and the number of Apps both available and deployed has increased significantly with the new, easier Docker engine powering them.

With hundreds of easy-to-deploy Apps and thousands more available through advanced deployment, over 80,000 members of the TrueNAS 24.10 community have deployed at least one App, extending  functionality to their system on top of the benefits of data management, performance, and integrity that ZFS provides.

To further support our community, we are introducing a new TrueNAS Apps Market to help you discover, manage, and customize TrueNAS Apps. This tool automatically updates from the TrueNAS Apps Catalog, ensuring that you have the latest available information on these additional add-on services.

There’s an App for That!

With the new TrueNAS Apps Market site, finding and customizing Apps has been made even easier. With a listing of top Apps by installation count as well as recent additions, TrueNAS users can explore Apps by category, status as Enterprise, , or Community, and even view the raw metadata used to allow advanced users to customize the installation to suit their unique needs.

Explore the TrueNAS Apps Market from anywhere at apps.truenas.com

With over 50 different Apps from multiple categories actively running on at least  1,000 TrueNAS systems, and our top 10 Apps scoring over 10,000 active installations, the Apps Catalog offers a well-tested method to customize the functionality of your TrueNAS system.

Detailed App Datasheets and Customization

When browsing the catalogs, once you find an interesting app, simply click on it for more details about the community behind it, sample screenshots, the current version available, and additional security capabilities.

See screenshots, version information, and more on detailed App pages.

Some of the additional information available on the detailed App page includes:

• Software version number and date of the last update
• App Home Page for further information
• A badge indicating approximate user count
• Example Screenshots
• List of processes and their UID/GIDs
• Security notes
• App metadata file that describes all user-configurable options
• Links to additional Resources such as deployment guides

Getting Started With Apps

Most new and existing App users should be using TrueNAS 24.10.2.1, the latest version of Electric Eel with robust Docker support and the largest user base of all versions of TrueNAS to date.

Early Adopters have started using TrueNAS 25.04 (Fangtooth), which will be more commonly used by June. We recommend checking the Software Status page for advice based on your user profile, as well as reviewing the docs and the release notes. No matter which of these versions of TrueNAS you opt for, the steps to enable Apps and make your first download from the catalog at apps.truenas.com are the same.

We’re grateful to the dedicated TrueNAS community for their ongoing feedback and support, as your insights continue to shape the evolution of TrueNAS. Download your copy of TrueNAS Community Edition today and join the thousands of users exploring our new Apps catalog. You can also visit the TrueNAS Community Forums and connect with us on   to share your experiences and insights as you customize your TrueNAS system.

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At TrueNAS, we’ve never built storage just for the sake of storing data. We build it to unleash creativity, empower innovation, and give organizations the freedom to scale without compromise.

That’s why we’re beyond proud to announce that the TrueNAS H30 has won not just one, but TWO Best of Show Awards at NAB 2025, presented by both ITPro and TVBEurope.

These back-to-back wins aren’t just a celebration of performance. They are a true validation of our core mission: to deliver enterprise open storage that solves real-world media challenges without the complexity or cost of proprietary alternatives.

Media Storage That Had Everyone Talking

The judges’ decision was definitive. Amid fierce competition from across the industry, the TrueNAS H30 distinguished itself in measurable ways.

ITPro’s panel of engineers and industry experts awarded the H30 their Best of Show Award, noting its exceptional performance characteristics for media-intensive environments. The system’s ability to deliver 8-10 GB/s throughput in a compact 2U form factor particularly impressed the judges, who noted its ideal suitability for demanding broadcast and post-production applications.

TVBEurope followed with their own Best of Show Award, highlighting the H30’s innovative approach to addressing the evolving challenges of modern content creation. The recognition underscores how the H30 delivers exceptional flexibility for managing complex media workflows while upholding the performance and reliability required in enterprise environments.

What Makes the H30 Different?

In an industry where performance demands continue to intensify, the H30 stands apart with capabilities specifically engineered for media professionals who require uncompromising storage solutions. As the pinnacle of the versatile TrueNAS H-series platform lineup, the H30 brings award-winning features including:

• Superior Throughput: With up to 8-10 GB/s of performance on tap, the H30 smoothly handles 4K/8K workflows and complex VFX rendering
• Configuration Flexibility: Customizable combinations of high-performance NVMe flash and/or HDD drives for capacity allow precise tailoring to specific production requirements
• Enterprise Protection: OpenZFS implementation with high availability design provides 99.999% uptime, ransomware-resistant snapshots, and exceptional protection against media corruption that can occur with other data storage offerings
• Operational Efficiency: Reduced power, cooling, and rack space requirements deliver up to 30% lower total cost of ownership

These capabilities represent a fundamental rethinking of what media storage infrastructure can and should deliver. The H30 embodies our philosophy that storage should accelerate and simplify creative work rather than constrain it.

Engineering Excellence with Purpose

The H30’s architecture reflects our core belief that enterprise infrastructure should be open, secure, and adaptable. With a 20-core Intel® Xeon® processor and up to 256 GB of ECC memory, the system handles parallel workflows with remarkable efficiency—whether processing AI/ML tasks, supporting video editing, or managing VM consolidation.

This performance doesn’t come at the expense of reliability. The H30’s OpenZFS foundation provides native checksumming, real-time replication, and comprehensive data protection features within an optional high-availability framework that ensures operational continuity.

A Milestone Built on Community

These prestigious awards represent more than just recognition of technical achievement, they validate the collaborative approach that drives our development process. Every aspect of the H30’s design has been informed by direct feedback from our customers, user community, partners, and industry professionals.

We’re profoundly grateful to this community. Your insights, challenges, and aspirations have shaped a product that truly addresses the needs of today’s media professionals.

Experience Award-Winning Performance

For organizations managing increasingly complex media pipelines, scaling to higher resolutions, or seeking liberation from vendor lock-in, the TrueNAS H30 provides the foundation for next-generation content creation.

• https://www.truenas.com/blog/truenas-h30-announce/
• https://www.truenas.com/get-quote/
• Join our community

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TrueCommand 3.1 adds support for the latest TrueNAS 25.04 “Fangtooth” releases, while managing ZFS replication, performance monitoring, and security has become even more streamlined and intuitive.

Available as both a Docker container and a cloud-based SaaS solution, TrueCommand secures communications via SSH tunnels and provides centralized control. While TrueCommand can run as an app on TrueNAS, we recommend deploying TrueCommand separately for optimal reliability and management.

Enhanced Monitoring and Management

TrueCommand 3.1 continues its evolution as a comprehensive management solution, bringing significant improvements:

• Disk IOPS Reporting Widget: A new widget offers accurate real-time insights into disk performance, empowering administrators to monitor and respond promptly to performance anomalies.
• Snapshot Task Toggling: Easily enable or disable scheduled snapshot tasks, giving you greater control over data protection schedules.
• Improved STARTTLS Support: New configuration options offer enhanced security and compatibility for Microsoft 365 users.
• Upgraded Runtime Environment: Node.js has been updated from version 20 to 22, offering improved efficiency, security enhancements, and performance.

Streamlined Replication Management

TrueCommand’s Replication Manager simplifies the administration of ZFS snapshots across multiple TrueNAS systems. With its intuitive wizard, setting up and monitoring replication tasks becomes straightforward, reducing manual administration effort and enhancing data protection capabilities.

The Replication Manager dashboard simplifies ZFS replication monitoring across your entire fleet.

Comprehensive Fleet Dashboard

TrueCommand 3.1 further enhances the Fleet Dashboard introduced in TrueCommand 3.0, providing additional insight into system health, disk utilization, and alert status across multiple systems. The dashboard allows administrators to quickly identify and address issues, significantly reducing downtime and improving overall operational efficiency.

(Image byline: Quickly assess system health and disk usage across your TrueNAS environment using the enhanced Fleet Dashboard.)

Expanded TrueNAS Compatibility

TrueCommand 3.1 supports a broad range of TrueNAS versions, including:

• TrueNAS 13.0 (Sustaining mode)
• TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” (GA version)
• TrueNAS 25.04 “Fangtooth”  (RC.1 for early adopters)

While TrueCommand 3.1 is generally backwards compatible with older versions of TrueNAS, we encourage users running these older versions to immediately upgrade to ensure compatibility and security while benefiting from the hard work of the TrueNAS Engineering team. Please review the TrueNAS software status page for the latest recommendations.

Upgrade Recommendations

TrueCommand Cloud deployments will be automatically updated to TrueCommand 3.1 over time. Self-hosted Docker-based deployments should follow standard container update procedures, including backing up your TrueCommand instance data, and reapplying TrueNAS passwords post-upgrade to ensure connectivity. Ensure that after upgrading your TrueCommand instance, administrators clear their browser cache (CTRL+F5) to help avoid potential UI issues.

Known Issues and Workarounds

While ongoing enhancements have addressed many reported issues, environments with large numbers of snapshots may still experience slower performance in the Snapshot Explorer. Additionally, users deploying TrueNAS Enterprise HA systems should manage system upgrades directly from the TrueNAS UI to avoid potential boot environment mismatches on controller restart.

Getting Started with TrueCommand 3.1

TrueCommand remains free for deployments with up to 50 drives. Larger environments can acquire software and support licenses via the iXsystems portal.

• Docker Container: Available on Docker Hub under the tag release-3.1.0.
• Cloud Service: Register for TrueCommand Cloud at the iXsystems portal.

Thanks to our dedicated community for providing valuable feedback and support. We continue to welcome your insights and suggestions as TrueCommand evolves.

To learn more about TrueCommand, including instructions on how to deploy a self-hosted container, see the TrueNAS Docs Hub on TrueCommand. There is also a guide on how to set up TrueCommand Cloud instances.

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Today, we’re capping off our TrueNAS H-series platform line with the upgraded TrueNAS H30. With support for 60 TB NVMe drives in each of its twelve bays and 100 GbE connectivity, the H30 delivers new levels of performance and capacity in the compact 2U storage market.

Powered by the newly released (TrueNAS 24.10.2) “Electric Eel” software and under active testing with the new TrueNAS 25.04 “Fangtooth” software, the H30 navigates effortlessly through a variety of enterprise workloads, from the edge of the cloud to the heart of your datacenter.

Like its H10 and H20 siblings, the H30 is a compact, low-power 2U platform designed for Edge workloads. With tri-mode technology to enable NVMe SSDs or SAS HDDs in each of its 12 bays, the H30 offers incredible advances in efficiency over previous-generation hardware, increasing performance and capacity by over 300%

All H-Series systems can be configured as either single controller or dual controller High Availability (HA) and offer expansion up to 114 drive bays in a 6U footprint. Upgrades from H10 and H20 to H30 can be done without data migration, and without downtime in HA systems. With network connectivity options from 1 Gbps through to 100 Gbps, the H30 is ready to be integrated into any network..

TrueNAS 24.10 delivers File, Block, Object, and Docker Apps services with HA using the highly reliable OpenZFS 2.3 as the unifying file system. 24.10 is now the most widely installed version of TrueNAS, with over 100,000 adopters in less than three months. The new TrueNAS H30 inherits all of the robust Electric Eel capabilities, including TrueSecure, with its federal FIPS 140 capabilities.

All TrueNAS platforms come with industry-leading Enterprise support, which is one of the highest rated on Gartner Peer Insights.

TrueNAS Fangtooth is preparing to enter its BETA release, adding several new capabilities to the TrueNAS H30 including:

• 16 Gb and 32 Gb Fibre Channel for SAN migration
• Fast Deduplication of NVMe flash storage for improved data reduction
• Support for LXC containers and VMs through new Incus integration

Apps, Containers, and VMs enable TrueNAS storage systems to add new services, software. These can include MinIO, Nextcloud, backup software, and data migration tools like SyncThing. Integrating applications and storage reduces the cost, power, complexity, and space for Edge deployments like retail storefronts, and allow workloads with heavy IO demands to run directly adjacent to high-performance storage.

WIth tri-mode capability allowing NVMe, SAS SSD, or HDDs in its twelve integrated bays, and additional SAS expansion up to 114 bays, the TrueNAS H30 delivers a broad choice of storage media:

• Hard Drives (HDDs) from 8 TB to 22 TB
  • Expansion from 12 Bays (2U) to 114 Bays (6U)
  • Max HDD Capacity: 2.5 PB + 100 TB Cache
• NVMe Drives from 3.2 TB to 60 TB
  • Max NVMe Capacity: 720 TB + Dedup/Compression

Monster-sized NVMe SSDs have proven very popular for M&E companies looking to edit 8K videos and other content. These new 60 TB SSDs will enable even larger systems while increasing capacity-per-watt and per rack unit. Existing 30 TB SSDs have also proven to perform well for virtualization workloads. For customers with specific security requirements, self-encrypting and FIPS-compliant drives are available as well. To discuss available options in detail, contact a TrueNAS sales representative.

HDDs are growing in size more slowly than NVMe SSDs, but can still deliver 75% lower cost per usable terabyte. For backup, archive video surveillance, and other use cases, spinning disks still offer the best capacity per dollar. Unlike flash-only systems, TrueNAS can seamlessly back up and replicate flash to HDDs without any change in web UI or API. Each TrueNAS H30 can start with low-cost HDDs and add NVMe flash as performance is needed.

The TrueNAS H30 delivers 8-10 GB/s of all-NVMe performance and well over 100,000 IOPS for each primary protocol (iSCSI, NFS, SMB, S3) twice as fast as the H20, with 20 cores vs 10 cores and greater RAM capacity. Even with this high performance on tap, the H30 is energy-efficient, consuming approximately 400W when equipped with dual controllers.

TrueNAS F-Series Also Grows NVMe Capacity

For those looking for even more performance than the new H30, our all-NVMe F-Series delivers up to 4×100 Gbe performance. With 60 TB SSDs, the all-NVMe TrueNAS F-Series can accelerate even more data with up to 10 PB capacity in 14U. Both the TrueNAS F60 and F100 can be expanded with NVMe-powered expansion shelves with the same robust enclosure management support as traditional SAS expansion.

TrueNAS F100 with both Flash and HDD Expansion Shelves

Ready When You Are

Talk to a TrueNAS sales representative if you need more information on any of our TrueNAS Enterprise systems. Our experts will match your use case requirements with the most cost-effective and future-proof platform. The H-Series platforms start from under $10,000 and grow based on performance and capacity needs.

The latest release of TrueNAS 24.10.2 is available now and is ready to download or update from the Web UI.

Monitor the Software Status page to see when your use case aligns with the updated version. When you’re ready, join the 100,000+ users already powering up with Electric Eel, and don’t forget to stop by the TrueNAS Forums to share your knowledge and experience.

Join today and help others unlock the power of True Data Freedom with TrueNAS.

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The TrueNAS Engineering team has made significant contributions to OpenZFS 2.3.0, with a pre-release version of OpenZFS 2.3 integrated into TrueNAS 24.10 (Electric Eel). This version has performed well and stood up to the standard of reliability set by OpenZFS. Customers can use Electric Eel today if they want several of these OpenZFS 2.3 features and the stability it offers.

The current development version of TrueNAS, Fangtooth, aligns with the OpenZFS 2.3.0 release. Fangtooth will use this version of OpenZFS throughout its version lifecycle. This blog outlines the current status of the full set of OpenZFS features in the upcoming release.

Fast Dedupe Delivers Good Performance

Deduplication is highly desirable for many workloads, including virtualization and several file storage use cases. Where there is naturally a high ratio of redundant data within a pool, deduplication effectively increases not only the usable capacity of the drives, but also the efficiency of the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) and Level 2 ARC (L2ARC).

To improve the performance for deduplication, the new Fast Dedupe capability was co-developed by TrueNAS and Klara Systems. Internal testing of Fast Dedupe has shown very positive results and confirmed the expected performance. Reads of unique data are largely unimpacted by dedupe, with reads of duplicate data being significantly more likely to be served by the primary ARC. Writes experience a reduction in performance compared to a system without deduplication, approximately 60% slower overall, due to the overhead of hashing and indexing the contents for later comparison and data reduction.

Fast Dedupe performs very well with NVMe drives (which are extremely fast by default) and we will be making this technology available on our F-Series and H-Series NVMe platforms with Fangtooth. With 21 NVMe drives (arranged as 4 x 5wZ1) and fast dedupe, TrueNAS performance was better than a comparable unit with 240 mirrored HDDs.

RAIDZ Expansion has been accelerated

A much-anticipated feature for smaller systems and home users of TrueNAS, RAIDZ expansion allows a small pool (e.g., a single RAIDZ vdev) to be gradually expanded with one drive at a time. Existing data is preserved with its original parity level and rewritten across all drives, while new data is written with the new parity configuration. This simplified administrative process gives smaller TrueNAS systems the flexibility to expand in single drive increments, rather than adding a full vdev of drives. The same expansion feature works regardless of the parity level used – RAIDZ1, Z2, or Z3 – but cannot migrate between protection levels.

The TrueNAS team helped sponsor and complete RAIDZ expansion in OpenZFS.

Many systems have tested this feature with Electric Eel. Because the process of rebalancing requires reflowing the existing data, the expansion often took days on an HDD-based pool. Our engineering team recognized that the reflow algorithms could be improved and have submitted a patch into the final OpenZFS 2.3.0 which typically accelerates this process by 5X, with potential gains up to 10X. TrueNAS Fangtooth will include this feature.

What else is in Fangtooth?

In addition to the major features highlighted above, TrueNAS 25.04 includes much more. At this stage of development, the NVMe Direct IO is not yet validated or activated. In addition, the ability to assign Apps to unique IP addresses or interfaces is in process, but will not be testable until the App catalogs are updated with the Fangtooth BETA release, currently targeted for February 2025.

For more details, see the Release Notes and join the discussion on the TrueNAS Forums, where early testers of the 25.04 pre-release versions are sharing their feedback and tips.

TrueNAS 25.04 “Fangtooth” is planned for formal release in April 2025, and will support upgrades from existing TrueNAS 24.10 installations. Get started today with the free TrueNAS Community Edition, and easily upgrade to Fangtooth upon release.

Want to learn more about TrueNAS solutions in your business? Contact us to speak to a product specialist and find out how to harness the power of open Enterprise storage.

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While the details can get technical, you don’t have to handle everything yourself. TrueNAS Enterprise appliances come pre-configured and performance-tested, so you can focus on your workloads with confidence that your system is ready to deliver. For our courageous and curious Community members, we’ve outlined the steps to defining, building, and testing a TrueNAS system to meet performance requirements.

Step 1: Setting Your Performance Target

Performance targets are typically defined using a combination of bandwidth (measured in GB/s) and IOPS (short for “Input/Output Operations Per Second.”) For video editing and backups, the individual file and IO size is large, but the number of IOPS is typically low. When supporting virtualization or transactional databases, the IO size is much smaller, but significantly more IOPS are needed.

Bandwidth needs are often best estimated by looking at file sizes and transfer time expectations. High-resolution video files can range from 1 GB to several hundred GB in size. When multiple editors are reading directly from files on the storage, bandwidth needs can easily reach 10GB/s or more; and in the opposite direction, a business may have a specific time window that all backup jobs must complete in.

IOPS requirements can be more challenging, but are often expressed as an expectation from a software vendor or end-user in terms of responsiveness. If a database query needs to return in less than 1 ms, one might think that this means 1000 IOPS is the minimum – but that database query might result in authentication, a table lookup, and an audit or access log update in addition to returning the data itself – a single query might be responsible for a factor of 10 or more IOPS generated. Consider the size of IO that will be sent as well – smaller IO sizes may only be able to be stored on or read from a smaller number of disks in your array.

Client count and concurrency also impacts performance. If a single client requires a given amount of bandwidth or IOPS, but only a handful of clients will access your NAS simultaneously, the requirements can be fulfilled with a much smaller system than if ten or a hundred clients are concurrently making those same demands.

Typically, systems that need more IOPS may also need lower latency. It’s essential to determine whether reliable and consistent sub-millisecond latency or low cost per TB is more important, and find the ideal configuration.

After deciding on your performance target, it’s time to move on to selecting your media and platform.

Step 2: Choosing Your Media

Unlike many other storage systems, TrueNAS supports all-flash (SSD), Hard Drive (HDD) configurations, and Hybrid (mixed SSD and HDD) systems. Choosing the media also determines the system capacity and price point.

With current technology, SSDs best meet high IOPS needs. NVMe SSDs are even faster and becoming increasingly economical. TrueNAS deploys with SSDs up to 30TB in size today, with larger drives planned for availability in the future. Each of these high-performance NVMe SSDs can deliver well over 1 GB/s and over 10,000 IOPS.

Hard drives provide the best cost per TB for capacity, but are limited in two performance dimensions. Sustained bandwidth is typically around 100 MB/s for many drives, and IOPS are around 100. The combination of OpenZFS’s transactional behavior and adaptive caching technology allow for the aggregation of these drives into larger, better-performing systems. The TrueNAS M60 can support over 1,000 HDDs to deliver 10 GB/s and 50,000 IOPS from as low as $60/TB. For high-capacity storage, magnetic hard drives offer an unbeatable cost per TB.

When your performance target is consistent sub-millisecond latency, and IOPS numbers are critical, systems like the all-NVMe TrueNAS F100 bring 24 NVMe drives. With directly connected NVMe drives, there’s no added latency or PCI Express switching involved, giving you maximum performance. With a 2U footprint, and the ability to expand with up to six additional NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabric) 2U shelves, the F100 is the sleek, high-performance sports car to the M60’s box truck – lighter, nimble, and screaming fast, but at the cost of less “cargo capacity.”

While TrueNAS and OpenZFS cannot make HDDs faster than all-Flash, the Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) and optional read cache (L2ARC) and write log (SLOG) devices can help make sure each system meets its performance targets. Read more about these devices in the links to the TrueNAS Documentation site above, or tune in to the TrueNAS Tech Talk (T3) Podcast episode, where the iX engineering team gives some details about where and when these cache devices can help increase performance.

Step 3: Choosing the Platform

After selecting suitable media, the next step to achieving a performance target is by selecting the proper hardware platform. Choose a platform balanced with the CPU, memory size, HBAs, network ports, and media drives needed to achieve a target performance level. Ensure that when designing your system to consider any requirements for power delivery and cooling in order to ensure overall stability.

Depending on the number and type of storage media selected, this may drive your platform decisions in a certain direction. A system designed for a high-bandwidth backup ingest with a hundred spinning disks will have a drastically different design from one that needs a few dozen NVMe devices. Each system will only perform as fast as its slowest component; software cannot fix a significant hardware limitation.

Each performance level has different platforms for different capacity and price points. Our customers typically choose the platforms based on the bandwidth and capacity required now or in the future. For systems where uptime and availability are crucial, platforms supporting High Availability (HA) are typically required.

Community users can build their own smaller systems using the same principles. Resources such as the TrueNAS Hardware Guide can offer excellent guidance for system component selection, as well as the TrueNAS Community Forums.

A key feature of TrueNAS is that all of our systems run the same software, from our all-NVMe F-series to the compact Mini line. While TrueNAS Enterprise and High-Availability systems carry some additional, hardware-specific functionality, the same key features and protocols are supported by TrueNAS Community Edition. There’s no need to re-learn or use a different interface – simply build or buy the hardware platform that supports your performance and availability requirements, and jump right into the same familiar interface that users around the world already know and love.

Step 4: Configuring a Test Lab

Not many users have the opportunity to build a full test lab to run a comprehensive performance test suite. At the TrueNAS Engineering lab, we maintain a performance lab for our customers and for the benefit of the broader TrueNAS community user base.

There are three general categories of tests that the TrueNAS team runs:

Single Client: A single client (Linux, Windows, Mac) connects via a higher-speed LAN (faster than the target bandwidth by 50%) to the NAS. The test suite (e.g., fio) runs on the client. This approach often tests the client operating system and software implementation as much as the NAS, and IOPS and bandwidth results are frequently client-limited. For example, a client may be restricted to less than 3GB/s even though the NAS itself has been verified as capable of greater than 10GB/s total. TCP and storage session protocols (iSCSI, NFS, SMB) can limit the client’s performance; but this test is important to conduct as it is a realistic use-case.

Multi-client: Given that each client is usually restricted to 2-3GB/s, a system capable of 10 or 20 GB/s needs more than 10 clients to test a NAS simultaneously. The only approach is to have a lab with tens of virtual or physical clients running each of the protocols. Purely synthetic tests like fio are used, as well as more complicated real-world workload tests like virtualization and software-build tests. The aggregate bandwidth and IOPS served to all clients are the final measures of success in this test.

Client Scalability: The last class of tests is needed to simulate use cases with thousands of clients accessing the same NAS. Thousands of users in a school, university, or large company may use a shared storage system, typically via SMB. How the NAS handles those thousands of TCP connections and sessions is important to scalability and reliable operation. To set up this test, we’ve invested in virtualizing thousands of Windows Active Directory (AD) and SMB clients.

Step 5: Choosing a Software Test Suite

There are many test suites out there. Unfortunately, most are for testing individual drives. We recommend the following to get useful results:

Test with a suite that is intended for NAS systems. Synthetic tests like fio fall into this category, providing many options for identifying performance issues.

Do not test by copying data. Copying data goes through a different client path than reading and writing data. Depending on your client, copying data can be very single-threaded and latency-sensitive. Using dd or copying folders will give you poor measurements compared with fio, and in this scenario you may be testing your copy software, not the NAS.

Pick a realistic IO size for your workload. The storage industry previously fixated on 4KB IOPS because applications like Oracle would use this size IO – but unless you’re using Oracle or a similar transactional database, it’s likely your standard IO size is between 32 KB and 1 MB. Test with that to assess your bandwidth and IOPS.

Look at queue depth. A local SSD will often perform better than a network share because of latency differences. Unless you use 100Gbe networking, networks will restrict bandwidth and add latency. Storage systems overcome latency issues by increasing “queue depth”, the number of simultaneous outstanding IOs. If your workload allows for multiple outstanding IOs, increase the testing queue depth. Much like adding more lanes on a highway, latency remains mostly the same, but with potentially greater throughput and IOPS results.

Make sure your network is solid. Ensure that the network path between testing clients and your NAS is reliable with no packet loss, jitter, or retransmissions. Network interruptions or errors impact TCP performance and reduce bandwidth. Using lossy mediums like Wi-Fi to test is not recommended.

In the TrueNAS performance labs, we run these tests across a range of platforms and media. Our goals are to confidently measure and predict the performance of Enterprise systems, as well as ensuring optimizations across the hardware and software stack of TrueNAS. We can also experiment with tuning options for specific workloads to offer best practices for our customers and community.

Electric Eel delivers Real Performance Improvements

Electric Eel benefits from improvements in OpenZFS, Linux, Samba, and of course optimizations in TrueNAS itself. Systems with an existing hardware bottleneck may not see obvious performance changes, but larger systems need software that scales its performance with hardware such as increasing CPU core and drive counts.

TrueNAS 24.10 builds on the 24.04 base and increases performance for basic storage services. Typically, we have measured up to a 70% IOPS improvement for all 3 major storage protocols (iSCSI, SMB, and NFS) when compared to TrueNAS 13.0. The improvement was measured on an identical hardware configuration, implying that the previous level of performance can be achieved with 30% fewer drives and processor cores for a budget-constrained use case.

“iSCSI Mixed Workload with VDIv2 Benchmark”

These performance gains are the result of tuning at each level of the software stack. The Linux OS has improved management of threads and interrupts, the iSCSI stack has lower latency and better parallelism, and code paths in OpenZFS 2.3 have made their own improvements to parallelism and latency. In the spirit of open source, the TrueNAS Engineering team helped contribute to the iSCSI and OpenZFS endeavours, ensuring that community members of both upstream projects can benefit.

Additionally, we also observed more than 50% performance improvements from changing media to NVMe SSDs vs SAS SSDs. Platforms like the all-NVMe F-Series can deliver 150% more performance than the previous generation of SAS-based storage.

Other highlights of the Electric Eel testing include:

Exceeding 20GB/s read performance on the F100 for all three storage protocols. The storage protocols all behave similarly over TCP. Write performance is about half as much due to the need to both write to the SLOG device and the pool for data integrity.

Exceeding 250K IOPS for 32KB block sizes on the F100. 32KB is a typical block size for virtualization workloads or more modern databases. This performance was observed over all three primary storage protocols.

Exceeding 2.5GB/s on a single client for each storage protocol (SMB, NFS, iSCSI) for read, write, and mixed R/W workloads. The F-Series is the lowest latency and offers the greatest throughput, but other platforms are typically above 2GB/s.

Each platform met its performance target across all three primary storage protocols, which is a testament not only to OpenZFS’s tremendous scalability, but the refinement of their implementation within TrueNAS to extract maximum performance.

Future Performance Improvements

Electric Eel includes an experimental version of OpenZFS Fast Dedup. After confirming stability and performance, we plan to introduce new TrueNAS product configurations for optimal use of this feature. The goal of this testing is to allow Fast Dedup to have a relatively low impact on performance if the system is well configured.

The upcoming OpenZFS 2.3 release (planned for availability with TrueNAS 25.04 “Fangtooth”) also includes Direct IO for NVMe, which enables even higher maximum bandwidths when using high-performance storage devices with workloads that don’t benefit as strongly from caching. Tests for this feature are still pending completion, so stay tuned for future updates and information on the upcoming TrueNAS 25.04 as we move forward with development.

The TrueNAS Apps ecosystem has moved to a Docker back end, which has significantly reduced base CPU load and memory overhead. This reduced overhead has enabled better performance for systems running Apps like Minio and Syncthing. While we don’t have quantified measurements in terms of bandwidth and IOPS, our community users have reported an overall positive perceived impact.

Evolution of TrueNAS

Given the quality, security, performance, and App improvements, we recommend that new TrueNAS users start their journey with “Electric Eel” to benefit from the latest changes. We will begin shipping TrueNAS 24.10 as the default software installed on our TrueNAS products in Q1 2025.

With the explosive popularity of Electric Eel, already more popular than Dragonfish and CORE 13.0, nearly all new deployments should deploy TrueNAS 24.10. Current TrueNAS CORE users can elect to remain on CORE or upgrade to Electric Eel. Performance has now exceeded 13.0 and the software is expected to mature further in 2025.

Join the Growing SCALE Community

With the release of TrueNAS SCALE 24.10, there’s never been a better time to join the growing TrueNAS community. Download the SCALE 24.10 installer or upgrade from within the TrueNAS web UI and experience True Data Freedom. Then, ensure you’ve signed up for the newly relaunched TrueNAS Community Forums to share your experience. The TrueNAS Software Status page advises which TrueNAS version is right for your systems.

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The TrueNAS Engineering team has been significantly contributing to the codebase of OpenZFS 2.3, and Electric Eel (TrueNAS 24.10) includes several new and long-anticipated OpenZFS 2.3 features. The current development version of TrueNAS, “Fangtooth”, aligns with the full OpenZFS 2.3 release and will use this version of OpenZFS throughout its version lifecycle.

With every new version of both TrueNAS and OpenZFS, additional features, test cases, and bug fixes are included. The previous OpenZFS 2.2 brought dRAID and block cloning to TrueNAS Dragonfish (24.04) and CORE 13.3. TrueNAS 24.10 adds a number of new features, including two highly anticipated enhancements: Fast Dedup and RAIDZ expansion.

This blog highlights these new capabilities and their status within TrueNAS.

Fast Dedup Development is Complete

Deduplication is highly desirable for many workloads, including virtualization and several file storage use cases. Where there is naturally a high ratio of redundant data within a pool, deduplication effectively increases the usable capacity of the drives and the efficiency of the Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) and Level 2 ARC (L2ARC).

One of the primary challenges with traditional ZFS deduplication has been keeping the large deduplication metadata tables in memory at all times to avoid significant performance penalties. This existing functionality was not performant and led to usability issues during operation. As the size of the deduplication tables increased, the ZFS ARC would shrink, and performance would degrade as the pool filled, leading to a poor user experience and challenges when scaling to higher storage capacities.

With the inclusion of Fast Dedup, the metadata size can now be automatically constrained to fit in either primary RAM or dedicated flash devices to avoid hitting the performance penalty wall. In addition, the metadata structure for Fast Dedup has been completely re-engineered to enable efficient updates and the ability to prune non-duplicate blocks, effectively shrinking the memory footprint of the deduplication tables by 90% in many cases.

Combining these metadata improvements with properly configured storage will improve deduplication performance by an order of magnitude for larger systems. Performance is more stable as the pool is filled, leading to predictable behavior and enhanced space-efficiency.

This Fast Dedup project started in 2023 and was committed to the OpenZFS project as a “Valentine’s Day Gift” in 2024. Allan Jude and Klara Systems collaborated with Alexander Motin and the TrueNAS Engineering team along with members of the OpenZFS community, and development was completed in September of this year. We appreciate the hard work and dedication shown by all contributors and testers to help bring this project through to completion.

With development completed, Fast Dedup is now ready for testing but not yet suggested for serious production use. Within TrueNAS, it is marked as Experimental. We expect to provide test results along with any necessary code improvements in early 2025.

RAIDZ Expansion is Finally Available

A much-anticipated feature for smaller systems and home users of TrueNAS, RAIDZ expansion allows a small pool (e.g., a single RAIDZ vdev) to be gradually expanded with one drive at a time. Existing data is preserved with its original parity level and rewritten across all drives, while new data is written with the new parity configuration. This simplified administrative process gives smaller TrueNAS systems the flexibility to expand in single drive increments, rather than adding a full vdev of drives. The same expansion feature works regardless of the parity level used – RAIDZ1, Z2, or Z3 – but cannot migrate between protection levels.

The expansion process is done while the ZFS pool is online, similar to the resilvering process when a drive fails and is replaced. Once completed, the larger pool’s full performance is available. The new disk is used immediately, with additional capacity being reclaimed as existing data is rewritten.

This project took several years to complete and test, will be included in OpenZFS 2.3, and is available now in TrueNAS 24.10. TrueNAS sponsored this work to benefit smaller systems and is fully supported within TrueNAS Electric Eel.

OpenZFS Direct IO Improves NVMe Performance

Direct IO is one of the latest features included in OpenZFS 2.3 and was provided by Los Alamos Labs. It provides the option to bypass the ARC when storing data directly on NVMe drives. Removing memory copies can increase a system’s bandwidth by over 30%. The primary use case for Direct IO is storing checkpoint data in High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. This specific use case sees very little benefit from the read caching of the ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache).

The Direct IO feature will only be available via Fangtooth. We are looking forward to testing for use cases that benefit our customers. Most workloads, however, will continue to benefit significantly from the default settings with ARC fully enabled.

What else is in TrueNAS 24.10?

In addition to the major features highlighted above, TrueNAS 24.10 includes an upgraded and improved webUI, enhancements to cloud backup integration, the replacement of Kubernetes with Docker for TrueNAS Apps, improved hardware support and drivers, and much more. For more details, see the Release Notes and join the discussion on the TrueNAS Forums, where some of the over 5,000 testers of 24.10 pre-release versions are sharing their feedback and tips.

TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” is planned for formal release near the end of October 2024. Want to learn more about TrueNAS solutions in your business? Contact us to speak to a product specialist, and find out how to harness the power of open source storage.

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TrueNAS Electric Eel (SCALE 24.10) is now feature-complete with the availability of the first Release Candidate. TrueNAS SCALE 24.10-RC.1 is now available for download, or update directly from within your existing TrueNAS installation. As always, please carefully read the Release Notes before deploying or updating your system.

Electric Eel emerged into the BETA stage on August 29th. In the last four weeks, a record number of users have volunteered to test Electric Eel and explore the new Docker-powered App capabilities. The Electric Eel uptake rate is over 3X Dragonfish and over 10X the 13.3 BETA versions.

The BETA process has proven that in-place App migration from Kubernetes to Docker will work for the existing catalog applications, with user data preserved. As of RC1, we have reached 100% in the Porting and Migration progress, as tracked on our GitHub Apps page. All previous Apps have been ported for new installs under the Docker framework, and users with existing Kubernetes-based installations from Dragonfish can automatically migrate during the TrueNAS upgrade process. Shout-out to our amazing Apps engineering team, as well as the community members who helped us test the migration processes during BETA. With this important migration milestone reached, we can now turn our attention to adding new Apps and Features in the coming months.

In addition to achieving parity between the old and new App catalogs, Custom Apps deployed under Dragonfish and earlier as Docker images can now be migrated to the native Docker framework in Electric Eel. More advanced settings such as manually installed Docker provisioning in a systemd-nspawn container using the community Jailmaker will need to be manually migrated.

What’s new in Electric Eel RC.1

We’d like to extend our thanks to our community members who jumped into the BETA release with both feet, eagerly testing, reporting, and helping us correct bugs. Our first BETA version was a success, and today’s RC.1 has 200 additional fixes and improvements.

Building on our community feedback, the engineering team has made several major improvements and has now completed the Electric Eel feature set. New functionality and changes in 24.10-RC.1 include:

• Login Alerts on root/admin user login or attempted login
• App logs are better captured and displayed in the UI
• Improved App Info cards (now with links)
• App Utilization (CPU/Memory/Network/Disk IO) displayed on the Apps page
• New Dashboard is completed with better mobile support. The legacy “Old Dashboard” has been removed.
• Custom App YAML Editor allows for custom application configurations to be deployed. (If a GUI is desired, we suggest deploying the built-in Portainer App.)
• Custom App Migration is enabled for users who deployed Docker images in Dragonfish and earlier using the “Custom App” UI option
• NVIDIA drivers are now handled in a more modular manner, and can be installed dynamically post-installation

Install the new modular NVIDIA drivers from the Apps -> Settings Page in 24.10

One of the major anticipated features of the Docker framework in Electric Eel that users have expressed interest in is the YAML editor for advanced Apps configuration. In 24.10-RC.1, the Custom App YAML editor now allows more complex Apps to be created and deployed through editing of the configuration file. For RC1, the ability to allocate a unique IP address for an installed App is not yet present. This functionality is planned as an App infrastructure update after the RELEASE version of Electric Eel is completed.

With BETA completed and now RC.1 released, the total feature set of Electric Eel can be summarized. We’re looking forward to more feedback (and bug reports!) from our community.

You can look forward to more blog posts and emails highlighting these new features and upgrades in 24.10 – while many of them are already present in RC.1, some of these features won’t be ready until RELEASE, while others such as Fast Deduplication are labeled as Experimental and should be handled with care by early adopters and testers only.

With Electric Eel now feature-complete, the TrueNAS engineering team is focused on the development of the next release, “Fangtooth” in mid 2025. More information will be available at the end of 2024. Many thanks to those who submitted, and voted for, the Feature Requests that have already been adopted. If you have a specific feature or functionality that you feel would benefit TrueNAS, please feel free to submit it on our Community Forums, and vote for other suggested features to help us enhance 24.10 and beyond.

When Should I Migrate?

If you are deploying a new TrueNAS system, we recommend TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish 24.04.2.2 for:

• Added functionality over CORE
• Vastly broader hardware support
• Expanded App catalog (which will migrate to Electric Eel)
• Sandboxes provide jail-like capabilities using systemd containers
• Better performance on most workloads
• Improved web UI makes managing TrueNAS easier than ever

Dragonfish users can easily update to Electric Eel RC.1 when desired, but at this point we only recommend it for early adopters. We recommend users review the TrueNAS Software Status page for advice.

If you’re ready to explore the Electric Eel Release Candidate, grab it from our downloads page now – and stay tuned for the upcoming full release!

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TrueNAS Electric Eel (aka SCALE 24.10) delivers its own shocks by introducing Docker Compose capabilities within Apps. Industry-standard Docker Compose applications can now be easily deployed on TrueNAS to benefit from the stability, flexibility, and performance of ZFS. The Electric Eel Nightly images are now available for testing, and the BETA1 version is expected to be ready in the week of August 27th. Bug fixes, feature updates, and ongoing polishing will continue until the targeted release date in October 2024.

Electric Eel Automatically converts Existing Apps to Docker

We’ve previously revealed that the transition of the TrueNAS Apps system from Kubernetes to Docker will take place in Electric Eel. We’re working hard to ensure that the migration from Helm Charts & Kubernetes to Docker Compose will be as seamless as possible for our user base.

The straightforward configuration of Docker Compose has led it to become the industry-standard tool for application distribution. Combined with optional Docker management layers like Dockge and Portainer, it’s now even easier to configure complex applications and networks.

Early testing has shown that Docker Apps not only deploy up to three times faster but also have lower CPU overhead when idle, reducing overall system power consumption. With this change, your TrueNAS Apps experience will be both faster and more efficient.

Electric eels are a neotropical freshwater fish known for their ability to stun their prey by delivering shocks at up to 860 volts. Their electrical capabilities contributed to the invention in 1800 of the electric battery. Electric Eels are now helping us save the planet!

The update to Electric Eel automates the entire Docker Compose transition process for official TrueNAS charts and standard Docker Apps deployed through the “Custom App” button. Apps like NextCloud, Plex, Syncthing, and hundreds of others will reboot with the TrueNAS Electric Eel update using Docker, but their software, data, and networking configuration will be preserved.

Because these Apps features and migration process need significant testing and validation, users with production workloads should refrain from deploying Electric Eel until after BETA and community feedback.

In addition to expanding the available Apps list and improving performance, leveraging Docker Compose capability also provides the ability to create more complex App environments, such as multiple Apps, dependencies, and associated ingress, load-balancing, VPN, and gateway policies. Multiple Apps can be bundled into their own private network. Please review the documentation and give us feedback on what works or is missing.

Sandboxes will persist during the upgrade to Electric Eel, and the existing Jailmaker script can still be utilized. Custom sandboxes are a common approach for advanced users wishing to run a Kubernetes, Podman, or other stack for those who need specific capabilities beyond Docker, such as Kubernetes APIs and Helm charts.

Electric Eel delivers more features on top of Dragonfish

TrueNAS Dragonfish (aka SCALE 24.04) has delivered on its promises with both a rich set of new features and the achievement of Enterprise quality with 24.04.2.

In addition to the Docker Compose transition, TrueNAS Electric Eel includes 400+ enhancements and bug fixes. The most obvious of the new features include the following.

Major Web UI Overhaul

The web UI has its largest overhaul since SCALE was first introduced in 2022. While the SCALE WebUI was significantly more dynamic and easier to use, the overhaul adds modern features for even greater ease-of-use.

Global Search capability significantly reduces the time to complete a task. Search for an item, and you’ll be taken to the right screen, highlighting the element to examine.

Table searching and filtering improves manageability for systems with hundreds of datasets, shares, LUNs or drives. Find problems or perform tasks in much less time.

Dashboard widgets have been extended and become size configurable. Create your own dashboards and share your recommendations.

Cloud Backup

Cloud backup to iX-Storj has been enabled. Cloud Backup extends TrueNAS functionality to backup your data to the Cloud by providing integrated snapshots (LUNs and shares), deduplication, and simple restore capabilities.

OpenZFS 2.3

OpenZFS 2.3 is still in development, and TrueNAS is tracking the latest approved updates, with several highly anticipated additions.

RAIDZ Expansion allows RAIDZ (Parity) vdevs to be expanded by one drive at a time, ideal for small footprint systems looking to expand incrementally. This feature also permits 2-drive RAIDZ1 systems, ideal for home users who want to start small on a budget.

The re-engineered Fast Dedup feature allows for deduplication to have much less performance overhead than the current dedup algorithm. Please note that Fast Dedup is not fully complete or tested and is still considered “experimental” at this time, and should not be used on production systems.

System Integration Improvements

TrueNAS is designed to simplify integration with other systems with its fully capable API. Electric Eel adds even more system integration capabilities.

Improved Data Migration: When using Syncthing to migrate from another SMB storage system, the Alternative Data Streams (ADS) are now also migrated. This can be used to migrate data from any SMB server, such as Windows, Synology, QNAP, Netapp, Pure, or Dell systems.

Cloud Management: A general initiative enables TrueNAS to be more easily installed and operated by cloud management services. This doesn’t reduce the ability to use the WebUI but makes it easier to install and operate tens and thousands of systems. Electric Eel has hooks for API-driven installation and a globally unique system ID.

FreeIPA support: While Microsoft Active Directory dominates the market, TrueNAS now enables FreeIPA, an open-source alternative to traditional AD environments.

Modular NVIDIA Drivers: The binary drivers for NVIDIA GPUs are now decoupled from the TrueNAS installation, allowing for these drivers to be updated on separate cycles from the main product.

Improved Logging: The TrueNAS built-in auditing capabilities will now log a wider variety of important changes made to the system. This includes audit logs of all changes made to any share settings or permissions and all commands run via sudo or with elevated administrative permissions. These are important for NIST 800-209 compliance.

TrueNAS Enterprise Improvements

Every TrueNAS version includes improvements that enable us to build faster and better-managed TrueNAS Enterprise appliances. Electric Eel includes a few of those features. Enterprise users should wait until Electric Eel is battle-tested before using the new software.

Tri-Mode Support: Some TrueNAS platforms are being enabled with tri-mode storage capabilities, allowing for combinations of HDDs, SAS SSDs, or NVMe SSDs in the same slots. This improves the cost, performance, and power of edge systems.

NVMe-oF Support: TrueNAS F-Series is stacked with ES24N (all-NVMe) expansion shelves for very large flash systems. This NVMe-oF architecture enables high-performing 5PB all-NVMe systems with similar management capabilities to SAS expansion shelves (JBODs).

Improved Enclosure Management: We’ve improved this popular tool for remotely managing the TrueNAS appliances. It allows the admin to visualize systems remotely and provide clear instructions for repair. The improvements include more accurate pictures of the enclosures and much faster rendering of the visual depiction, especially for very large systems.

When Should I Migrate?

If you are deploying a new TrueNAS system, we recommend TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.2 for added functionality, vastly broader hardware support, an expanded App catalog, better performance on most workloads, and an improved Web UI, all of which make managing TrueNAS easier than ever. TrueNAS 24.04 “Dragonfish” includes support for Sandboxes, which provide jail-like capabilities using systemd nspawn containers.

TrueNAS 13.0 users looking for the new capabilities outlined above can sidegrade to TrueNAS SCALE anytime, preserving data and essential NAS functionality such as SMB, NFS, iSCSI, and VMs – with the primary exception being Jails. TrueNAS 13.3 allows updates to FreeBSD jails.

As discussed here, TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” also provides a native Docker Compose environment that vastly improves running applications with lower overheads and opens the door to more complex network setups (similar to Jails). However, we do not recommend updating to Electric Eel until it is more tested and mature. For current software recommendations, always review the Software Status page for recommendations based on your profile.

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The first partner in this exciting venture is Eshtek, the pioneering company behind the upcoming HexOS home server, dedicated to making network-attached storage accessible and easy for the less IT-savvy. By leveraging the robust and reliable TrueNAS platform, HexOS will offer users a streamlined and automated experience for managing and protecting their personal data.

HexOS provides a beautifully simple UI, making it easy for users to set up and manage their own home servers. Jonathan Panozzo, the co-founder of Eshtek, commented, “Our mission is to empower individuals with complete control over their data and privacy without requiring IT admin skills. Partnering with TrueNAS enables us to provide an enterprise foundation for our home server solution, ensuring top-notch performance, reliability and security.”

“We are thrilled to support HexOS in their mission,” said Brett Davis, EVP at TrueNAS. “Our collaboration combines TrueNAS’s enterprise reliability with HexOS’s user-friendly interface, creating a powerful solution for both content creators and everyday users.”

The HexOS beta is planned for Q3 2024, and interested users can sign up on the HexOS website to enroll in their newsletter and stay updated on the latest developments.

For more information about HexOS, please visit www.hexos.com.
To learn more about the Powered by TrueNAS initiative, click here to contact us.

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Managing large amounts of data while ensuring reliability, performance, and protection from failures and breaches—all within a limited budget and with minimal complexity—is a formidable challenge.

TrueNAS, a trusted name in enterprise data storage, offers robust and scalable systems that can meet these needs. Starting with a single unit is a great way to experience TrueNAS’s capabilities, but here’s why expanding to multiple systems can truly transform your data strategy.

Unleashing the True Power of Expanding to Multiple TrueNAS Systems

Enhanced Data Protection

Starting with one TrueNAS system provides robust storage solutions, but adding a second or more units significantly enhances your data protection.

With multiple systems, you can create off-site backups using TrueNAS’s powerful replication functionality, protecting against localized disasters like fires or floods. This ensures your data is always available and secure.

Optimize for Diverse Workloads

Different tasks require different performance characteristics. By deploying multiple TrueNAS systems, you can fine-tune each unit to handle specific workloads—whether it’s high-speed NVMe storage on a flagship TrueNAS F-Series, multi-petabyte archives on a TrueNAS M-Series, or anything in between.

This customization ensures peak performance without compromise. For instance, you can dedicate one system to handle high-throughput transactional databases while another manages long-term data archives, optimizing your infrastructure to deliver superior performance tailored to each application’s unique demands.

Empower Remote Offices

With multiple TrueNAS systems, remote offices can enjoy the benefits of local storage. This setup minimizes productivity loss due to network outages and slow file transfers. TrueNAS’s two-way file synchronization keeps remote offices seamlessly connected and operational, even during network interruptions.

By having local storage at each remote site, employees can work efficiently without relying on potentially unstable internet connections, thus maintaining high productivity and operational continuity.

Unified Management with TrueCommand

Managing multiple systems can be daunting, but TrueNAS makes it simple. With a unified software stack and the powerful TrueCommand management tool, you can oversee all your TrueNAS units from a single interface. This simplifies administration and enhances operational efficiency.

TrueCommand offers comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and analytics across your entire storage environment, allowing you to manage capacity, performance, and security from a single pane of glass, reducing the administrative burden and improving response times.

Enhanced Ransomware Protection

Multiple TrueNAS systems offer layered defenses against ransomware and other cybersecurity threats. By combining snapshots, one-way replication, and isolated system trusts, your data remains secure even if one system is compromised. This redundancy ensures rapid recovery and uninterrupted operations.

The advanced security features of TrueNAS, such as immutable snapshots and one-way replication, provide an additional layer of defense, ensuring that your data can be quickly restored to a known good state, minimizing downtime and data loss.

Future-Proof Your Data Storage

Investing in multiple TrueNAS systems is more than an upgrade—it’s a strategic move to protect, optimize, and future-proof your data. The flexibility and resilience of TrueNAS make it the ideal choice for enterprise environments where data integrity and performance are paramount.

As your business grows and data demands increase, TrueNAS’s scalable architecture allows you to expand your storage capabilities seamlessly, ensuring that your infrastructure can adapt to changing needs without requiring a complete overhaul.

Start Small, Grow Big

Adopting TrueNAS units, whether starting with one and expanding to two or more, is a decisive step towards safeguarding your enterprise data. Experience the benefits of TrueNAS with a single unit, and see how scaling up to multiple systems can enhance your data strategy.

Shield your data. Boost your performance. Future-proof your storage—with TrueNAS.

For more information on TrueNAS solutions and how expanding to multiple TrueNAS systems can transform your data storage strategy, visit our community forums or contact our sales team.

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Our move represents more than just a technological upgrade; it’s a commitment to building an even more inclusive, welcoming, and collaborative space for everyone who uses TrueNAS.

So Why the Change?

Our previous forum platform (XenForo) served us well but had limitations that became increasingly apparent. We needed a platform that would be able to scale with our growing community, one that encourages deeper engagement and fosters a more connected and organized experience.

Welcome to the New Home of the TrueNAS Community

Discourse offers a wealth of features and functionalities that will empower our community:

• Modern interface: Intuitive and user-friendly, making it easier for newcomers to navigate and find the information they need.
• Advanced search: Quickly find relevant discussions and topics, saving valuable time.
• Upvoting and flagging: Democratize content discovery and promote helpful and informative contributions.
• Badges and reputation system: Recognize and reward active community members, fostering a sense of belonging and contribution.
• Integrations: Seamlessly connect with other platforms and tools, enhancing the collaborative experience.
• New system sharing tool (coming soon): We’re preparing a tool that can help you automatically generate your system specifications and configuration, whether it’s to show off your completed TrueNAS build or help with troubleshooting!

But the power of Discourse lies not just in its technology, but in its philosophy. It’s designed to promote healthy interactions, discourage trolling and negativity, automatically filter out unwanted spam, and create a welcoming environment for all voices.

Be sure to join the new TrueNAS Community today and reserve your name! Once you’ve registered, don’t forget to update your signature at https://forums.truenas.com/u/YOURUSERNAMEHERE/preferences/profile with your specs so that you can show off that data storage!

Community Means Shared Responsibility

To ensure the success of our transition and shape the future of the community, we’re forming a Community Council. This council will be composed of both iXians and dedicated community members. Together, the committee will:

• Assist in QA and development of the TrueNAS Community.
• Help establish clear guidelines and best practices for the community.
• Organize events and initiatives to promote engagement and collaboration.
• Work with iX on future development plans for the forums and products, ensuring they align with community needs.

The TrueNAS Community: Everyone is Welcome.

We want to emphasize that the TrueNAS community is everyone who uses TrueNAS. This includes:

• Experienced TrueNAS users sharing their expertise.
• Beginners looking for help and guidance.
• Developers contributing to the project.
• Enthusiasts sharing their passion and creative use cases.
• Current or future professionals who want to evaluate TrueNAS for their business.

Regardless of your background, experience, or technical knowledge, you have a valuable contribution to make. We invite you to join us on this journey.

The Road Ahead: A Long Journey with a Shared Destination

Transitioning to our platform is not a simple overnight task. Throughout the process, we’re aiming to provide clear communication, updates, and opportunities for feedback.

The future of the TrueNAS community is not solely up to iX or the Community Council; it’s also up to you, the community. By coming together, embracing open communication, and sharing our perspectives, we can continue to build a truly  exceptional community. Together we can make TrueNAS even better, one post, collaboration, and innovation at a time.

Join us on this exciting journey as we work together to shape the future of the TrueNAS community. Let’s make it a space where everyone feels welcome, empowered, and inspired to contribute their unique voice.

Welcome to the future. Welcome to the TrueNAS community!

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TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish (24.04), the fourth major version of SCALE, builds on the high availability, scale-up storage, and easy deployment of containerized applications included in Cobia (23.10). The new features of Dragonfish were previously described in the BETA announcement and demonstrated by prolific community member Tom Lawrence. These included over 1,000 improvements addressing security, auditing, cloud backup, reporting, and log management. We’re very excited that the Release version is on track for April 2024.

Major SMB Services Improvements

TrueNAS 23.10.2 has been well received by those using it, particularly those running SMB. It is our recommended version today, and provides Enterprise quality with fast failover (HA systems only), SMB file sync, and optional FIPS-grade encryption.

While Dragonfish can provide all of the standard file, block, object, and App services of Cobia, this section will focus on the improvements for SMB users of TrueNAS specifically. Whether you are running Windows, MacOS, or Linux clients, SMB has become the most commonly used file sharing protocol. Here are the primary changes coming with Dragonfish compared to Cobia and TrueNAS CORE:

Major SMB Performance Accelerations

• 10x faster server-side file copies with OpenZFS 2.2.2
• 2x increase of default ZFS ARC size to match TrueNAS CORE ZFS usage
• Better metadata management for up to 10x faster directory listings
• Improved speeds allow over 1 million files per Directory (10x increase)
• General Samba 4.19 speed improvements
• Over 3GB/s second single-client speed without SMB Multichannel

Significant SMB Server Security Improvements

• Auditing of TrueNAS UI/API events
• Audit logging of all TrueNAS system and SMB login attempts
• Vastly Improved Log management UI
• Restricted admins (system, storage, monitoring) using Directory Services (Enterprise only)
• Immutable ZFS snapshots (relies on restricted admins)
• Samba 4.19 security vulnerability fixes
• NIST 800-209 Storage Security Compliance for government/defense customers
• First-ever Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for TrueNAS

Advanced File Sharing Features

• Simpler SMB and NFS share creation with a wizard
• SMB auditing of client and file events (e.g., open, read, write, modify)
• FreeIPA support (open-source alternative to Active Directory)
• Syncthing importing of SMB shares from other systems with full ACLs/permissions
• Verified support for shares with mixed NFSv4 and SMB access

Automated Backup and Management

• Improved backup and setup of Cloud Sync Tasks
• Visibility into backup status on main dashboards
• Replication management via TrueCommand 3.0
• SMB session management
• Netdata reporting integrated within WebUI

The much-desired return of Netdata reporting is only possible because of its full support of Linux. Unfortunately, Netdata’s support of FreeBSD was tepid at best.

The RC1 version includes over 200 fixes to the BETA. If you’re interested in seeing the full list of improvements and fixes, check out the SCALE 24.04-RC1 Release Notes on the TrueNAS Docs site.

As with any RC1 release, we recommend that only testers and early adopters use this version until there has been more feedback from the Community. The TrueNAS Software Status Page tracks the quality and user type and usage recommendation of the release. TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2 is recommended for nearly anyone from early-adopters to conservative users.

TrueNAS CORE 13.3 is Planned for Q2

TrueNAS SCALE is the software edition where forward-looking development takes place. Once new features and components  are tested and validated there, some are eligible for backporting to TrueNAS CORE. The focus of TrueNAS CORE continues to be sustaining storage reliability and security for existing users.

The next version of TrueNAS CORE (renamed as 13.3 to align with its FreeBSD base version) is planned for Q2 of 2024. This will include updates to ZFS as well as an upgrade of Samba to version 4.19 to maintain parity with Dragonfish. It also smoothes transitions for users from CORE to SCALE, especially for HA systems.

TrueNAS 13.0 users can easily “sidegrade” to TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish with the primary exception being Jail users. Dragonfish includes early support for Sandboxes, offering jail-like capabilities in Linux.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2 is the Current Version

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE has matured rapidly and offers a more robust app environment based on Linux Containers & KVM. TrueNAS SCALE has become the recommended version for new TrueNAS users.

The latest Cobia release, TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2, has reached Enterprise quality and is now used by many of our largest and most conservative customers. More than 105,000 users are currently using TrueNAS SCALE and it is available for download here.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with apps and sandboxes. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

Freedom to Store What’s Valuable to You

For each new release, our focus stays the same—to provide you with the freedom to access and manipulate your data your way. As TrueNAS has evolved, it has brought a cleaner user interface with added features like apps and catalogs to serve your requirements.

We look forward to working with the TrueNAS Community to rapidly progress Dragonfish through RC1 and Release. If you have a test system, please download the Dragonfish RC1 and report any bugs you find. Our engineering team would also like to hear positive experiences from any of the new features.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish improves SMB Services and Performance appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The results from 741 respondents, across the TrueNAS forums, subreddit, and various social media revealed that 58.8% of participants were considering KVM-based hypervisors as their top choice. Following behind were Microsoft’s Hyper-V with 11.9% and Xen-based hypervisors with 11.5%. Additionally, 17.8% of respondents were considering staying with VMware at its higher cost. Notably, these responses show a gravitation towards open-source alternatives driven by a desire to safeguard against potential future lock-outs.

Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft Hyper-V is a native commercial hypervisor most commonly used for creating virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. As Microsoft’s hypervisor-based virtualization platform, Hyper-V offers a solution tailored to the unique demands of Windows environments. This integration facilitates management and interoperability with various Microsoft technologies, including native support for Windows Server features such as Active Directory, PowerShell, and System Center.

In addition to its strong ties with Windows Server, Hyper-V also extends its support to Linux virtual machines, making it a choice for heterogeneous environments.
Learn more about using Hyper-V with TrueNAS

KVM-Based

KVM, or “Kernel-based Virtual Machine”, is a free and open-source module for the Linux kernel that allows the Linux kernel to act as a hypervisor. Initially released in 2007, KVM has been leveraged by multiple virtualization products, including as the integrated hypervisor within TrueNAS SCALE. Open hypervisor choices include OpenShift, oVirt, and Proxmox. KVM is also used as the basis for some commercial hypervisors, such as the Nutanix Acropolis HyperVisor (AHV). In the community survey, Proxmox was the most common KVM-based choice.

KVM can be deployed as part of an integrated hypervisor such as Proxmox, or used as an underlying component of a more customized solution. While KVM itself is free and open source, some solutions that integrate it may offer professional paid support plans, and different suites of tools for creating, configuring, and managing virtual machines.
Learn more about using KVM-based hypervisors with TrueNAS

Xen-Based

Like KVM, Xen is a free and open-source hypervisor, originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Xen is used as the basis for both fully open source products such as XCP-ng, as well as in commercial products like Oracle’s VM Server and Citrix’s XenServer. In the survey, XCP-ng was the most common Xen-based choice.

Similarly to KVM, some Xen-based hypervisors are available as purely free open source software, with the option of paid support plans such as XCP-ng. Xen also has additional management planes beyond the built-in web UI, including Xen Orchestra, to aid in the administration of clustered systems.
Learn more about using Xen-based hypervisors with TrueNAS

TrueNAS: Compatible with Any Hypervisor

With features such as ZFS, replication, and snapshotting, TrueNAS ensures data integrity, availability, and protection for virtualized environments. Supporting block and file, TrueNAS is flexible enough to fit seamlessly into your existing virtualization infrastructure and can be tuned to meet even your most demanding performance needs.

This means whether you’re using VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, or any other hypervisor, TrueNAS offers compatibility and freedom of choice, so you can have the flexibility you need without the barriers commonly associated with proprietary locked-in solutions.

To find a virtualization solution that is perfect for your environment, start by checking out the Community’s recommendations on our newly-created community section “TrueNAS as VM Storage”, complete with use case and licensing information for each solution.

New to TrueNAS? The TrueNAS SCALE Evaluation Guide offers a step-by-step breakdown, from the initial boot to replication, enabling you to navigate TrueNAS with confidence. Once up and running, you can explore deeper with virtualization tutorials available in TrueNAS documentation. With TrueNAS Community insights and practical guidance at your fingertips, you’ll be better equipped to make informed decisions for virtualization and your data.

Join the Conversation

Let us know what you think! Hypervisor discussions are currently unfolding on the TrueNAS forums. Participate in the general discussion or jump into the thread to discuss the hypervisor you are considering. There is a thriving community rallying around Open-Source platforms powered by TrueNAS, sharing invaluable support and insights. Join the conversation today to offer your perspectives, experiences, or questions about VMware alternatives.

The post Beyond VMware: Exploring Virtualization Alternatives appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Fast Dedup is a major overhaul of the original OpenZFS deduplication capability. One of the primary issues with traditional deduplication with ZFS has been the need to keep the deduplication hash tables in memory at all times to avoid massive performance penalties. This existing functionality led to performance challenges when scaling up capacity and usability issues during operation.

With the introduction of Fast Dedup, there have been several major innovations including:

• The size of metadata is now dynamically sized to fit in either RAM or dedicated flash devices to avoid hitting the performance penalty wall.
• The metadata structure has been completely re-engineered to enable efficient updates using a log append process, greatly improving performance for large updates such as deletions.
• The dedup table will favor dedup-able data and prune blocks that show no dedup potential.
• Combining metadata improvements with properly configured storage, including dedicated metadata flash devices, will improve the sustained dedup performance by over an order of magnitude for larger systems.

Kudos to the Development Team

Led by Allan Jude of Klara, the development team included engineers from Klara and iXsystems. The development was completed in less than a year thanks to the strong OpenZFS expertise of the team. The project was primarily sponsored by iXsystems for use in TrueNAS, the industry’s most used storage platform.

“Klara is very proud of the speed and functional quality of the Fast Dedup development.” said Allan Jude. “We look forward to completing the integration and testing work needed for this to be a standard OpenZFS capability, with no extra cost.”

By contributing the software now, Klara and iXsystems are working to ensure it will have the quality needed to be included in OpenZFS 2.3. The contributed software has gone through preliminary validation and we look forward to wider community testing. Making it available to the OpenZFS community will allow enhanced review and testing with a broader range of use cases and capacities.

“The OpenZFS Community is very excited to receive this major contribution of Fast Dedup software,” said Matt Ahrens. “Fast Dedup has been a major user desire for many years and we are pleased to see that Klara and iXsystems have developed the feature in-line with our general requirements. We look forward to testing and integrating the new software.”

OpenZFS 2.3 is expected to take most of the next nine months to mature and reach release quality and status. These Fast Dedup features will be integrated with TrueNAS SCALE “Electric Eel” along with other expected OpenZFS improvements.

TrueNAS with Fast Dedup

Test software, not to be used for production, is expected in Q2 for TrueNAS SCALE. This will allow validation of functionality and performance prior to a production release.

A formal TrueNAS release with Fast Dedup included is planned for the second half of 2024. This will be in both TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, including the TrueNAS F-Series, M-Series, and R-Series.

“Fast Dedup has been a longstanding desired feature of ZFS and TrueNAS, and can deliver 5X the usable capacity and 20X the performance.” said Kris Moore, SVP of Engineering. “These attributes will significantly improve the economics of OpenZFS storage relative to Cloud storage and proprietary storage, and our team could not be more ecstatic to see this come to fruition.”

Contact the Developers

For more information or to volunteer for the ongoing testing and validation processes, please contact one of the primary developers.

iXsystems is the company behind TrueNAS. You can make an impact in the community by getting to know TrueNAS SCALE now, developing on nightly builds in March, and testing closer to RELEASE later this year. If we can also help your company with TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, book a time to chat with a product specialist.

Klara is a leading developer of OpenZFS and FreeBSD software. Interested in Klara developing software for your OpenZFS project? Contact Klara to learn more about their offerings.

The post Fast Dedup is a Valentines Gift to the OpenZFS and TrueNAS Communities appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

What’s New In Dragonfish?

Just another thousand improvements and fixes, of course! Rather than go through every enhancement in detail, we’ll provide a quick overview and share the specifics of key Dragonfish features in future blogs. Some of the highlights include: Infrastructure

• Latest OpenZFS 2.2.2
• Increase of default ZFS ARC size, to match TrueNAS CORE ZFS usage
• Linux Kernel 6.6 and improved Hardware Support
• Update to NVIDIA Driver 545.23.08
• Improved Log management UI
• Apps can be restricted to read-only or write-only permissions
• Preliminary Power-User capabilities for TrueNAS Sandboxes (systemd-nspawn “jails”)

File Sharing

• Samba 4.19.3 update and speed improvements
• Simpler SMB and NFS share creation with a wizard
• SMB auditing of client and file events
• FreeIPA support (alternative to Active Directory)
• Syncthing Importing of SMB shares from other systems with full ACLs/Permissions

Cloud Backup

• Improved backup and setup of Cloud Sync Tasks
• Visibility into Backup Status on main dashboards
• iX-Storj Backup of datasets (Web UI) and zvols (CLI-only)
  • Snapshots and Deduplication of all backup data

Security

• Auditing of all UI/API events
• Audit logging of all login attempts
• Tech-Preview of Restricted admins (System, Storage) using Directory Services (Enterprise-only)
• Immutable ZFS snapshots (relies on restricted admins)

If you’re interested in seeing the full list of improvements and fixes, check out the SCALE 24.04-BETA Release Notes on the TrueNAS Docs site. As with any BETA release, we recommend that only testers and developers use this version until there has been more feedback from the Community. The TrueNAS Software Status Page tracks the quality and user-type and usage recommendation of the release.

Dragonfish Increases SCALE ARC Sizing

After extensive testing, TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish resolves the previous limitations around the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) bringing SCALE in line with the TrueNAS CORE platform, offering significant improvements in performance and memory management. While this adjustment can be manually made in TrueNAS SCALE 23.10, Dragonfish makes it the default, allowing for greater performance of your most frequently and recently used data.

Dragonfish Uses Linux Kernel 6.6 with LTS

Each new version of TrueNAS uses the latest stable and well-supported version of the underlying OS. The decision on which version is finalized well before the 1st ALPHA software version. Linux Kernel 6.6 has its own set of improvements, plus support for new hardware. In addition, we added the later NVIDIA 545.23.08 driver, which includes improved support for a wider range of GPUs. There will be descriptions of other features in future blogs over the next few months.

TrueNAS CORE 13.1 is Planned for Q2

TrueNAS SCALE is the software edition where new features and updated components are developed and tested. Once those are tested and validated, some are eligible for backporting to TrueNAS CORE. The focus of TrueNAS CORE continues to be ensuring storage reliability and security for existing users. The next version of TrueNAS CORE (13.1) is planned for Q2 of 2024. This will include updates to ZFS as well as an upgrade of Samba to version 4.19, to maintain parity with Dragonfish. It also smoothes transitions for users from CORE to SCALE, especially for HA systems. TrueNAS 13.0 users can sidegrade to TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 with the primary exception being Jail users. Dragonfish will include early support for “sandboxes”, which are jail-like capabilities using systemd nspawn containers. Thanks to the community user jip-hop for creating the jailmaker scripts.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.1.3 is the Current Version

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE has matured rapidly and offers a more robust apps environment based on Linux Containers & KVM. TrueNAS SCALE is generally recommended for new users that need embedded apps, and will gradually become the recommended version for all new TrueNAS users. The latest stable release, TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.1.3, has significantly improved quality and reliability and is now used by many of our largest customers. More than 100,000 users are currently using TrueNAS SCALE and it is available for download here. There will be a TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2 version released later in February. TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

Freedom to Store What’s Valuable to You

For each new release, our focus stays the same—to provide you with the freedom to access and manipulate your data your way. As TrueNAS has evolved, it has brought a cleaner user interface with added features like apps and catalogs to serve your requirements. We look forward to working with the TrueNAS Community to rapidly progress Dragonfish through BETA to RC1 and Release. If you have a test system, please and report any bugs you find. Our engineering team would also like to hear positive experiences from any of the new features.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish Reaches BETA appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

By keeping it closed, vendors can ensnare customers into a more resource-intensive and expensive model while promising that solutions will be forthcoming. Their goal is to grow fast, improve margins, and extract the maximum customer revenues by preventing alternatives from getting a foothold.

This has been the storage model for decades. Where there had only been proprietary solutions before, Open Infrastructure has become the dominant model for operating systems (Linux), containers (Kubernetes), databases (NoSQL) and many more layers of the stack. So, why has the model for storage remained unchanged when the rest of IT infrastructure has evolved beyond it?

The Open Source Choice

By contrast, Open Storage is built around a mindset of abundance, where the best products and user experience win in the marketplace. The combination of an open-source community, customers, and vendor support yields a confluence of innovation that no lone source could provide.

At iXsystems, we seek to give our customers more choice in how they can store, access, and manipulate their data. We call this Data Freedom, which we define as: what all organizations ultimately want and expect from storage: flexibility and choice. In other words, the freedom to go faster, lower infrastructure costs, and reduce operational effort. In our model, the only “lock-in” we strive for is a user and customer experience so gratifying that customers don’t ever need or want to leave.

Rising Costs

Odds are you’ve seen articles and discussions of increasing hardware prices. Here are two recent examples highlighting expectations that storage will be more expensive in 2024 than it was in 2023:

• Market Anticipates a 50% Price Surge for NAND Flash in Short-Term
• Prices Rise as IT Spending Trends Upward for Servers, Storage

There is no more serious business than protecting data thus storage is naturally the last place where anyone would want to skimp. Vendors prey on this emotion, persuading customers that the value they claim is worth paying more for, and the only way you can be successful. But, the reality is, the “big” brands charge more because they must. Their business model relies on meeting Wall Street and investor expectations, where growth and profit are the only measures.

Alternatives are bad for the status quo, especially when an alternative is rated equally or more highly. One way for an alternative to rate more highly is to be focused on delivering what the customer wants/needs as opposed to the vendors’ business model.

What Can I Control?

If you are part of the selection process for infrastructure vendors, what’s most under your control is your “short list”. Alternative brands often cost less as they are in a “challenger” position against the leading brand. Any organization has the option to consider “challenger” brands and non-commercial tools. What might have been the best or only choice in the past, might not be the best one today.

While broadening the list of choices, new requirements can also be added in the spirit of “skating to where the puck is going”. Don’t plan based upon the past, rather envision what your future will bring. You have the power to ensure your investments today will align with the future of both the market and your data center infrastructure.

Where Is The Puck Going?

The best choice today is storage that is compatible with, and optimized, for where the market is going. The good news is that the marketplace trajectory is becoming more flexible in its deployment options, more capable by including functionality , more open in its development model, all while delivering better value overall to those deploying it.

According to research, analysts recommend that organizations explore the emergence of the “edge storage platform” (ESP). The ESP is where data manipulation and transformation at the edge will create value most quickly. As part of the larger “universal storage platform” (USP) architecture that unites edge, cloud, and core data centers, ESPs are best optimized for certain workloads, use cases, and data service management methods.

These requirements are different from traditional and legacy data center models and must include:

• Flexibility to scale up and down cost-effectively
• Software-defined storage with self-healing technology
• Support for Block, File, Object, and App storage with Kubernetes
• Centralized data management
• Data transfer/transformation optimization

It will be interesting to see how the definition of “storage” evolves over time. One thing is for sure, traditional storage vendors face a significant challenge in meeting these new requirements.

The Elephant in the Room

If I am not paying for it, how can I trust it will not fail? This is a very human reaction. No one has ever lost their job for choosing a top-branded, premium-positioned solution when it inevitably suffers a fault. After all, your data is priceless and the best solutions are always costly, so your storage should be expensive, right?

Mathematically, how can you calculate the currency-equivalent value for reliable storage solution operations if its software is open source and freely distributed at no cost? Your high school math teacher stated that anything divided by zero is undefined; that sounds risky. Perhaps it might be best to take a different perspective when considering value creation for storage.

Same Outcome, Lower Cost

Generic medicines are considered by most (including regulators) to be “as effective” as Big Pharma offerings with the same active ingredients. Packaging, marketing, sales, etc. are very different for a leading brand as they have market position to protect and stakeholders to appease. None of this impacts the efficacy of the medication, but it does affect the sales price.

Just as being free is not a disqualifier for having value, lower-cost open products should not be presumed to be of lower quality by design. Challengers streamline or reduce much of the cost structure to deliver an equivalent product at a lower price point. We are champions of open infrastructure. Read more about how iXsystems passes these savings on to our customers.

Experience it for Yourself

The Open Source model has many advantages in reducing software development costs. It can even bring features to fruition more rapidly as community members assist in the development effort. This is a fundamentally different approach that delivers greater value at lower expense while providing what customers want in their storage solution.

Sounds too good to be true? We encourage you to experience TrueNAS for yourself today (download TrueNAS here), listen to what our customers are saying on Gartner’s Website, or if you’re storing critical data, feel free to schedule a call with one of our helpful Solution Advisors.

Still curious about why we do what we do? Check out this video with some of the faces behind TrueNAS, sharing their perspectives on what it is like for iXians to come to work every day and deliver TrueNAS to the world.

The post Why Traditional Enterprise Storage is So Expensive appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

At iXsystems, we do not answer to the same Wall Street or Venture Capital stakeholders that other vendors do. This allows us to focus exclusively on making our customers successful, powered by our core value to always “think people before profit”.

The benefits of our Open Source business model are no secret. They are simply unique to iXsystems in the Enterprise Storage market. We leverage open source development, non-traditional tactics, and the energy and engagement of the massive TrueNAS Community to help deliver products rated higher on Gartner than our competition. Collectively, this gives iXsystems an unfair and sustainable advantage in delighting customers while charging less to deliver positive outcomes.

Simply put—our model requires far fewer resources, and we pass those savings on to our customers. We charge less.

How It Works

Compared to iXsystems, traditional data storage vendors are forced to maintain outsized corporate overheads — both in terms of expense and effort — just to keep their technology closed, patented, and to capture 100% of the value they create.

We carry none of that burden, which enables us to be more nimble and efficient. Here’s how that works and how it benefits our customers:

Community – Community is the special ingredient. We are grateful to be stewards of the TrueNAS Open Source project. Consider the unique combination of TrueNAS community and users; iXsystems and partners; customers; and non-paying users. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and contributions from the Community bring enormous value. With iXsystems’ contributions and the incredible Community, this enables agility, investment, and innovation to TrueNAS that no proprietary company could emulate.

Software Development – Plain and simple, making software that is proprietary and closed-source requires more effort, resources, and money than open-source development. Most storage vendors also have multiple code bases, further compounding this disadvantage, while iXsystems has one open-source code base to maintain and grow. This common code base includes many other open-source elements (e.g., OpenZFS), which expands the community of talented Engineers directly contributing to TrueNAS, further reducing costs.

Product Management – Unlike other enterprise storage vendors, iXsystems does not invest in efforts to lock in customers; we do the very opposite by making TrueNAS as open, compatible, interoperable, and easy to leave as possible. However, we believe that once you experience TrueNAS, you won’t want to leave. We don’t have complex software licensing, and our appliances can run the latest software for years, long after the hardware is depreciated — a sustainability practice we fully encourage! At iXsystems, there are zero development cycles spent on planned obsolescence.

Security – TrueNAS is Open Source and therefore transparent by default, with broader user coverage and more eyeballs on the code, thereby leveraging massive user communities to help uncover, alert, and respond to security vulnerabilities. This enables code fixes much faster than proprietary vendors who can only rely on internal resources or respond only after the vulnerability has impacted their customers. Additional security enhancements (e.g. FIPS 140) are available with TrueNAS Enterprise appliances.

Quality – This is another area where the Community makes a huge difference. At a fraction of the investment, Quality Assurance for TrueNAS software takes less time, money, and resources, all while providing more complete test coverage. When a version is declared ready for general use, it has benefitted from extensive community testing. TrueNAS sees faster bug reporting/testing and a more rapid access to new features and fixes than other vendors (who often use their first customer shipments as QA) because of the feedback from the community.

Interoperability – Being open also makes iX a very easy company for other software vendors to partner with, as they need no demo units or non-disclosure agreements to test that their technology works well with TrueNAS.

Documentation – Like Quality, many hands make for light work. By the time a release is recommended for general use, documentation has been reviewed by thousands, accelerating the process of ensuring accuracy.

Intellectual Property – Effort is required to protect technology for maximum profit. iXsystems spends no energy on patents, choosing instead to focus resources on value creation rather than blocking innovation.

Sales – TrueNAS Community Edition software is free to try and use, and has been shown to run on almost any x86 hardware, or can be spun up easily in a VM. As such, we encourage audiences to try it for themselves without any involvement from a sales team. Our experts at iX then help customers identify the optimal configuration of TrueNAS Enterprise appliance(s) for important storage applications.

Marketing – Where our competition spends money on marketing, we instead spend on developing free software that delights our users. Word of mouth is the original marketing tactic and the goodwill we invest in the TrueNAS community results in outsized awareness. With more than 15 million downloads and more than a half million active community members, appreciative users write blogs and how-to content, influencers create videos, and hundreds of thousands of community members tell others about their positive experiences with TrueNAS.

Sustainability – Most storage vendors rely on forced obsolescence to maintain growth. At the end of its supported life, most IT infrastructure is scrapped and not recycled, let alone reused. With TrueNAS software, organizations can repurpose infrastructure beyond its normal life and extract more value from it. After 3-7 years of mission-critical duty, appliances from iXsystems can remain updated with the latest software and transition to a less critical storage role for many years while positively impacting sustainability and financial efficiency.

How This Benefits YOU

“Value” means receiving the most for your dollar. However, most traditional vendors use the word “value” in the context of justifying why it’s worthwhile to pay more for their product. At iX, we don’t have to contort the definition of the word into something it’s not. Our goal in creating TrueNAS was to allow our customers to receive more from our products while also paying less — the true meaning of value as far as we’re concerned.

Experience it for Yourself

We encourage you to experience True Data Freedom for yourself today (download TrueNAS here), see what our customers are saying on Gartner’s Website, or if you’re storing critical data, feel free to schedule a call with one of our helpful Product Experts.

Still curious about why we do what we do? Check out this video with some of the faces behind TrueNAS, sharing their perspectives on what it is like for iXians to come to work every day and deliver TrueNAS to the world.

The post How TrueNAS Delivers Unbeatable Value appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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

The post TrueNAS Year in Review: Top Stories of 2023 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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.

The post The New Performance Flagship: TrueNAS F-Series appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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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Today, we are releasing TrueNAS SCALE 23.10-RC.1 and enabling “Distributed RAID” (dRAID) for the first time. OpenZFS dRAID Pool Layouts provides a mechanism for distributing vdev data and parity across every device in a large pool. The benefits include optimal load-balancing across all drives as well as much faster resilver times, which is particularly useful for large drives. This results in greater storage efficiency and reliability for high capacity systems. We are keen to get testing and feedback from the community for this new technology.

The 23.10-RC.1 version includes another 200 bug fixes and improvements and is nearly feature-complete. While it’s not yet a Release version (planned for late October), the evidence is pointing to the RC1 version approaching the quality we are aiming for. We’ll report back to the community as we get feedback on this RC1 version.

Built-in Feedback and Bug Reporting

TrueNAS SCALE Cobia RC1 also introduces major conveniences for providing feedback to iXsystems. At the top of the page is a “smiley face” icon to encourage feedback.

After clicking on the icon, you can give feedback on the design of the page and add any important details for your use case. If you have a bug to report, then click the File Ticket link and submit a bug report, which will include automatically collected information about your system. In response, you will get a TrueNAS ticket link for your bug where you can monitor its status and resolution

Summary of TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 Features

The highlights of 23.10 “Cobia” include:

• OpenZFS 2.2 with many iXsystems contributions
• Linux Kernel 6.1 and improved Hardware Support
• NVIDIA 535.54.03 Driver Updates
• Improved Apps UI
• Improved Storage Pool UI
• ZFS Block Cloning (Deduplication) for faster SMB & NFS file copies
• ZFS dRAID Pool Layouts
• Netdata backend stats collection
• Samba update and speed improvements
• Simplified SMB cluster expansion via TrueCommand 3.0 (Coming Soon!)
• Importing SMB shares from other systems (Release version)
• Scale up to 1200 drives and 25PB+ on a single system
• iSCSI improvements including ALUA support
• Simplified feedback and bug reporting
• Pause / Unpause ZFS Scrub Controls
• Reduction of HA failover times by up to 70%

For this RC1 release, we recommend that only testers and early adopters use this version until there has been more feedback from the Community. The TrueNAS Software Status Page will keep track of the quality and user-type recommendation of the release.

TrueNAS Enterprise and associated appliances are based on either TrueNAS 13.0 or Bluefin (22.12). Cobia (23.10) will be added as an option after its formal release in Q4 this year.

How Do TrueNAS 13.0 Users Benefit?

After TrueNAS SCALE Cobia is released, there will be a TrueNAS CORE & Enterprise update to TrueNAS 13.1. This will include many SMB and ZFS improvements that have been tested in Cobia. This TrueNAS 13.1 release is planned for early 2024. Nightly versions have been made available for testing.

TrueNAS 13.1 includes additional features to simplify “sidegrading” from TrueNAS 13.1 to Cobia, especially for Enterprise HA systems. The ZFS and SMB stack will be well aligned and the Cobia iSCSI stack will include ALUA. There will be additional information available on TrueNAS 13.1 when it reaches BETA status.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3 is still the Current Version

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE offers a more robust Apps environment based on Linux, KVM, and Kubernetes. The latest release, TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3.3, has significantly improved quality and reliability. More than 75,000 users are currently using TrueNAS SCALE and it is available for download here.

There will be a TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.4 version released in October. After that TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 will gradually become the recommended version.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with Apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

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With a robust computer and software background, Kris has undoubtedly left a mark within the Open Source community. His proficiency in Shell scripting, C++, FreeBSD, and system administration reflects years of dedicated experience. Kris’s early interactions with Open Source date back to the 90s and paved the way for his career. From pioneering web services using fledgling versions of FreeBSD to his enduring preference for FreeBSD’s stability, Kris’s insights during the podcast offer a glimpse into his role in driving engineering and innovation here at iXsystems.

Isaac Levin, the host of “Coffee and Open Source,” steers the conversation and uncovers Kris’s technical abilities while offering a unique perspective. One notable topic is how Kris likes to pair interns with subject matter experts on the TrueNAS Development Team, fostering an environment where young talents learn directly from experienced professionals. This approach imparts invaluable knowledge and allows budding developers to discover their true passion for software development.

So, grab your favorite drink and join us for an episode of “Coffee and Open Source.” Immerse yourself in the chat between two tech gurus as they explore the nuances of innovation, Open Source, and the dynamic path Kris is shaping at iXsystems.

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TrueNAS continues to receive new and enhanced security features and tools with each release. TrueNAS Enterprise, as well as the free open source TrueNAS editions, are becoming increasingly sophisticated in protecting data from a wide variety of threats. Also, more users are deploying TrueNAS to meet retention and reporting requirements for compliance. To build on this foundation,  we are introducing TrueSecure^TM, an optional FIPS 140-validated crypto module for TrueNAS Enterprise appliances and launching the updated TrueNAS security site.

Secure by Design

Storage vendors at the lower end of the market, like QNAP and Synology, have made some design decisions that favored ease of use over security which have subjected their users to continual virus and ransomware attacks. By contrast, enterprise storage products like TrueNAS must be built with security as a primary design principle so that they can integrate into secure network environments and minimize attack vectors against data.

However, new threats come online with such frequency that new features and tools will always be needed to stay ahead of the curve. With TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3, we introduced a FIPS 140-3 validated crypto module and the option to enable TrueSecure on Enterprise appliances.

New Security Page Provides Enhanced Protection

Infrastructure and data can be better protected with knowledge of all vulnerabilities. The updated TrueNAS Security site now includes a detailed Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for TrueNAS and provides detailed documentation on all known security vulnerabilities and CVEs. This is done with regular and automated security auditing. Please explore the information which also provides links to the relevant Open Source repositories and planned fixes.

TrueNAS Security Features are Extensive

In a short blog, it is impossible to explain every feature under the umbrella of “security” and why each is important. With ransomware being top of mind in 2023, security features specific to ransomware protection are summarized in this recent blog. The chart below tries to capture the key categories of security-related features in TrueNAS. If you need more information, visit the TrueNAS Security site.

No amount of storage-level security will make up for not following network and general IT best practices. For example, we do not recommend directly attaching TrueNAS to the Internet without a robust firewall. Services like Active Directory and LDAP are also recommended for password administration. By following network security best practices, TrueNAS is more secure.

Backdoor access to storage is an attack vector that concerns users around the world. Whether left vulnerable by a public sector organization or a private business, backdoor access represents a target for both state-sponsored and private malicious actors. TrueNAS can be configured to strictly control access, and unlike proprietary storage vendors, all of the software that enforces those controls is open and reviewable.

TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin Enhances Security

With TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin’s release last year, there have been many security advancements:

Rootless administration allows changing away from using the commonly known “root” username and instead setting up your own unique administrator usernames and passwords.

OpenZFS snapshot retention tags can prevent snapshots from being deleted, remaining on the system permanently as a restore point. This provides additional protection against ransomware by allowing the administrator to make a decision on when it is safe and appropriate to remove the snapshot outside of normal retention policies.

API Keys with ACLs are laying the groundwork for future Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enhancements in coming releases. This allows further fine-grained control over assigned API key privileges.

2-Factor Authentication (2FA) verifies the identities of administrators using Google Authenticator or any Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) compliant authentication application. This feature also exists in TrueNAS 13.0.

iX-Storj Globally Distributed Storage is primarily cost-effective cloud storage, but it inherently protects data by encrypting it on the TrueNAS system before distributing the data via erasure coding over a global network. Thanks to the combination of zero-trust and zero-knowledge encryption in use, no storage provider or government entity has access to your private data stored on iX-Storj, so your data remains yours alone.

Introducing 

Government agencies often require specific security and compliance measures in both software and hardware which are not normally required in other businesses. TrueSecure is an optional package available in TrueNAS Enterprise (SCALE 22.12) that delivers specific benefits to Government organizations. Our goal is to comply with the requirements of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and make this additional security as cost-effective as possible. These capabilities are also the basis of international support for ISO 27001.

Many security capabilities will find their way into TrueNAS, but some of these will be specific to TrueSecure. TrueSecure provides the following capabilities:

FIPS 140-2 validated storage media provide highly secure Data-at-Rest capabilities. Both HDD and SSD (SAS or NVMe) drives can be provided on standard TrueNAS Enterprise systems. These drives are similar to self-encrypting drives (SED) but include tamper-proof mechanisms for additional security.

FIPS 140-3 validated software encryption module provides highly secure Data-in-Transit capabilities. The validated encryption algorithms are more secure than the current open source algorithms and validated for use in critical Federal use-cases. For example, these algorithms will protect administration and data replication tasks.

Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) provides the capability to centralize the management of SED and ZFS encryption passwords for larger organizations. This capability is also in TrueNAS Enterprise 13.0.

With TrueSecure, iXsystems is actively working to maintain NIST 800-171 Compliance, which is the preferred approach for USA Government entities to manage their cybersecurity. It is a comprehensive and well structured approach that iXsystems is adopting, along with the TrueNAS product requirements. Any additional capabilities needed are being added to TrueSecure, if not in the general TrueNAS products. iXsystems is also developing Security Technical Information Guides (STIGs) for use with TrueSecure to help lockdown TrueNAS Enterprise systems and ensure secure operation.

TrueNAS Enterprise 22.12 is not only secure storage, it can be configured for government-grade security. With the Cobia release later in 2023, new features and tools will continue to enhance security. Areas being actively invested include file change auditing, virus scanning, and additional ransomware prevention. Stay tuned for more information which will be available as Cobia enters its BETA phase in Q3.

If you’d like to speak with iX about any TrueNAS system or security needs, please contact us.

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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.

The post iX-Storj Cloud Storage Now Starts at Industry-leading $2.50 per TB/month appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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.

The post TrueNAS 13.0-U5 Maximizes Quality and your Storage Experience appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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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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Fig. 1 – Non-Production and Production TrueNAS VMs

Virtual machines (VMs) provide opportunities to easily stand up instances of TrueNAS for a number of different purposes. End-users might use these to evaluate the functionality of TrueNAS in their environment, check out the differences between CORE and SCALE, or walk through the process of upgrading a legacy FreeNAS system to a recent release of TrueNAS. Developers at iXsystems make extensive use of virtualization when troubleshooting, documenting, and building new versions of TrueNAS; and yes – some TrueNAS users even deploy a fully-virtualized TrueNAS solution for their production environments.

Of course, TrueNAS SCALE also includes its own KVM hypervisor and can run its own VMs; however, that’s not the subject of this particular blog.

Before we continue, let’s open with a little disclaimer banner:

Warning

If the best practices and recommendations for running TrueNAS as a virtual machine are followed, a TrueNAS VM can be a safe and reliable way to store data. Failure to adhere to these same recommendations can result in permanent corruption and/or loss of your data without warning, even if the system appears initially functional. Please read through them all carefully!

Apologies for the Scary Red Text, but this needed to be made abundantly clear. Let’s get started!

1. Consider Your Use Case

While “test-drive” and “development” use cases can play a little bit more fast and loose with the recommendations for virtual hardware, a production use-case is where certain caveats and precautions need to be taken into account.

Testing, Exploring, or Development (“Non-Production Use”)

If you’re looking to gain familiarity with the TrueNAS UI, do some development work on the TrueNAS code, perform a dry-run of upgrading between versions, or set up any other situation where data that you care about isn’t at stake, you can likely go ahead with very few guardrails on your virtualization solution. Use your hypervisor of choice to create a VM with at least 8GB of RAM, two or more vCPUs, a 16GB install disk, and data disks of whatever size are appropriate for your testing (see later in the document for some important notes if using multiple virtual disks!) – mount a TrueNAS ISO of your choice, and enjoy.

This process can be completed in less than five minutes – or if you’d prefer, you can download and deploy a pre-built TrueNAS SCALE VM image in Open Virtualization Format.

Storing Important Data (“Production Use”)

As soon as you’re storing data that you care about keeping safe, or readily available, then you should consider your TrueNAS use as a “production environment”.  – this includes if it’s at home protecting your personal photos, or in an office safeguarding important documents.

For TrueNAS and OpenZFS to offer absolute protection for your data, they should have direct access to a storage controller and the drives attached. Without direct access, there is a possibility of the hypervisor interfering with settings, reordering or reconfiguring drives, and introducing avenues for data corruption. Virtual data disks are not as reliable, and are particularly prone to operator mistakes such as accidental deletion or inadvertent use of hypervisor-based snapshot technology.

The key piece of the puzzle is a technology broadly referred to as PCI passthrough – this might be given a different name such as “VMDirectPath I/O” “Discrete Device Assignment” by the vendor, but the core functionality must remain the same – the virtual machine must be able to address the PCI hardware device directly, without going through an abstraction layer.

When creating a TrueNAS VM for production use, the storage controller must be assigned to the VM via PCI passthrough. This will prevent the hypervisor from claiming the controller with its driver, and allow TrueNAS to use its own.

Most desktop virtualization applications (eg: Oracle Virtualbox, VMware Workstation) do not support PCI passthrough. Instructions for enabling PCI passthrough on various bare-metal hypervisors are listed below.

• VMware ESXi: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1010789
• KVM: https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/How_to_assign_devices_with_VT-d_in_KVM
• Xen: https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough
• Hyper-V: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/plan/plan-for-deploying-devices-using-discrete-device-assignment

When using PCI passthrough, TrueNAS will treat the storage controller just like it’s been installed on physical hardware. This direct access to the PCI device does prevent several advanced features of virtualization from functioning, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Hot adding and removing of virtual devices
• Suspend and resume of the VM
• “Record and replay” functionality
• Fault tolerance and high availability, including “live migration” features
• VM snapshots (note – ZFS snapshots inside of TrueNAS do work)

In order to use PCI passthrough, you need to have an additional storage controller that is not being used by your hypervisor to boot or run other data. It is suggested to use a host bus adapter (HBA) supported by TrueNAS, such as an LSI/Broadcom/Avago controller from the SAS2308 or newer chipset family.

While the older SAS2008 chipset was historically recommended, recent updates to both the VMware ESXi vmkernel and the FreeBSD 13.x kernel have exposed edge-cases that may cause system instability and failure of the VM to properly claim the PCI device at boot time. TrueNAS SCALE may be less picky.

2. Choose Your Hypervisor Platform

The iXsystems development team runs TrueNAS as a VM on a daily basis. Our virtualization platform of choice remains VMware, and it’s the platform in which the TrueNAS developers have the most experience. Both TrueNAS CORE and SCALE include the VMware Guest tools as well, in order to respond gracefully to shutdown requests from the host OS, as well as pass some information back to the hypervisor. If deploying TrueNAS for a “non-production” use case, the desktop VMware Workstation application can be used – but for a “production” VM, the requirement for PCI passthrough means the standalone ESXi hypervisor should be used instead.

Our second choice for a virtualization platform is KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) – which is also the hypervisor layer implemented into TrueNAS SCALE, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Proxmox VE. While TrueNAS has no built-in guest tools installed for this hypervisor, you can still have a solid virtualization experience regardless.

Other hypervisors such as FreeBSD’s bhyve, Citrix’s Xen, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V may also work, but the development team does not test with or use them on a daily basis.

Regardless of the hypervisor solution you choose, ensure that you follow the vendor’s guidance regarding hardware selection and configuration. Running the hypervisor on a physical hardware solution that is supported by the vendor’s Hardware Compatibility List or similar reference document is strongly encouraged, especially if running a “Production” TrueNAS VM is desired.

3. Virtualizing ZFS

The ZFS file system used by TrueNAS combines the roles of RAID controller, volume manager, and file system all into a single software component. ZFS expects direct access to your disks in order to work properly, in order to issue direct SCSI or SATA commands and receive an expected and predictable response. The closer you can get TrueNAS to your storage hardware, the happier it is, and the better it can do its job of keeping your data safe.

Hypervisor-backed virtual disks or hardware RAID controllers provide a “translation layer” to the disks, and therefore should be avoided for the data disks. TrueNAS boot devices are an exception, and can be stored on a hypervisor virtual disk safely – but it is suggested to create two identical volumes and use the TrueNAS installer to mirror these within the guest OS as well. Ensure that the underlying physical storage backing these hypervisor virtual disks is sufficiently redundant as well.

4. Configuring your Virtual Hardware

For a non-production TrueNAS VM, the minimum hardware requirements for TrueNAS will suffice, but when assigning resources to a production instance, some suggestions apply.

4.1 Select the proper Guest OS in the hypervisor

The virtual hardware presented to a VM is often dependent on the “Guest OS” selected. If possible, choose the matching OS based on the TrueNAS version:

TrueNAS CORE: FreeBSD 13.x (64-bit)
TrueNAS SCALE: Debian Linux 11 “Bullseye” (64-bit)

Do not select a “Linux” guest OS for TrueNAS CORE and do not select a “Windows” guest OS for either CORE or SCALE. “Other OS” can be selected for CORE if FreeBSD is not present, and “Other Linux” can be selected for SCALE.

TrueNAS contains the VMware Tools add-on, with support for the vmxnet3 drivers. These are suggested over the emulated E1000 Intel card.

4.2 Don’t over-assign CPU cores

For a light I/O workload, start with 2 vCPUs and provide CPU reservations or “guaranteed execution time” if you expect periods of high overall host usage in order to prevent your TrueNAS VM from becoming CPU-starved. If you expect to use iSCSI, have heavy random I/O workloads, or run compression stronger than the default LZ4 algorithm, assign 4 vCPUs. Monitor the statistics provided by your hypervisor for signs of virtual CPU exhaustion (add more cores) and co-scheduling stalls (remove CPU cores) and adjust gradually.

4.3 Assign sufficient RAM

The TrueNAS recommendations regarding sufficient RAM still apply to a VM. As a hypervisor host often contains a large amount of physical RAM, consider assigning a minimum of 16GB to the TrueNAS VM, with more added if you plan to deploy Apps or use a performance-intensive workload. Guest memory should be reserved and locked, preventing it from being shared or swapped at the hypervisor level – this is often a requirement for PCI passthrough enablement.

4.4 Enable unique ID for Virtual Disks

If deploying for non-production with multiple virtual disks, or production with virtual boot devices, TrueNAS may raise an alert that the serial numbers of the disk are not unique, often because they are missing. While an override exists in the UI to permit the use of non-unique S/N’s in a pool, this may result in unexpected behavior when attempting to import pools. It’s better to correct this at the VM level if possible. With VMware ESXi, you can set the advanced VM option disk.EnableUUID=true as described in the following knowledge base article:
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52815

Other hypervisors such as Xen, KVM, and Hyper-V may have different capabilities and methods of setting the serial number of virtual disks.

4.5 Avoid nested virtualization

TrueNAS SCALE and CORE both offer the ability to run VMs of their own, using the KVM or bhyve hypervisor respectively. While this functionality may work with TrueNAS itself as a VM, it can be challenging to enable, support, and troubleshoot – and is outside the scope of this guide.

Using TrueNAS SCALE with Apps or containers is expected to work on a TrueNAS VM for both testing and production cases.

4.6 In a multi-socket system, be mindful of NUMA limitations

Multi-socket systems arrange CPU sockets, memory slots, and PCIe lanes into groups known as Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) nodes – communication within a node is significantly faster than communication between nodes. The benefits of spanning multiple NUMA nodes are often limited by this link.

Take the example of a system with 2x 8-core CPUs and 128GB of RAM, divided into two nodes of 8 cores + 64GB each. Assigning more than 8 cores or 64GB of RAM will cause the VM to span NUMA nodes, causing unpredictable performance if a thread is scheduled to run on a remote core or accesses a remotely-stored part of the RAM.

For similar reasons, configure your hypervisor to “pin” the VM to the NUMA node where the HBA is connected. Remote access across the node interlink for all HBA traffic can cause significant impact across the system, as periods of high I/O such as ZFS scrubs can cause congestion. Consult your vendor’s maintenance or service guide for an illustrated block diagram or PCIe slot-to-socket mapping table to identify the correct NUMA node.

Summary

If using a TrueNAS VM for “Production Data” – data that you want to keep safe and/or guarantee availability of – the only recommended approach is PCI passthrough of a TrueNAS-supported HBA. Various alternative configurations for RAID controllers (with or without “HBA Mode” or “JBOD-Like” behavior), paravirtualized disks, and local drive mapping have been proposed and often tested by community members, but the only configuration that has proven consistently reliable over the years has been full PCI passthrough.

For non-production use, research and development, or experimentation, use your hypervisor of choice, follow the simple guidance around the guest OS, and enjoy!

Feel welcome to join the TrueNAS Community Forums and share your feedback with running TrueNAS, both the technical process of running it as a virtual instance, as well as your overall impressions of the software. As an open source product, iXsystems believes in working with the community to help make TrueNAS the best it can be.

The post Yes, You Can (Still) Virtualize TrueNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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.

Strong Company Culture: Every employer claims to treat their people well, but at iXsystems, we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk. We believe in putting our people before profit and encourage open communication to foster a supportive, family-like atmosphere. Associates are encouraged to take part in company clubs, free drink Fridays, dinners, and additional events throughout the year.

Growth Opportunities: Opportunities abound at iXsystems, and we’re always looking for ways to help our employees grow and succeed through kaizen. Whether it’s through professional development programs or promotions, the company is committed to helping its employees reach their full potential.

Flexibility: iXsystems recognizes that its employees have different needs and offers flexible work arrangements to accommodate them. This includes the option to work remotely for many positions, which is particularly valuable in today’s world.

Community Involvement: We’re an ultra-collaborative company that cares about more than just the bottom line. iXsystems actively works to give back to the community through charitable events and initiatives. We also make sure to give back by upstreaming code to other Open Source projects and offering TrueNAS SCALE and CORE completely free and Open Source.

Exciting Projects: Working for iXsystems means getting the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects that are making a difference in the world. Whether it’s developing new technologies or solving complex problems, there’s always something interesting and challenging to work on. Giving you the opportunity to solve challenges for today and tomorrow.

Competitive Benefits: If all of this wasn’t enough, we also offer a competitive employee benefits package, including medical, dental & vision coverage for employees that are covered by the company.

Ready to join us and experience a new and meaningful career? Visit our careers page to see all of the exciting career opportunities here at iXsystems.

Joshua Smith
Senior Marketing Manager

The post What’s it Like Working at iX? appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

A zero-trust architecture is a vital security model for businesses that assumes that all network traffic is untrusted and should be treated as such. In a zero-trust environment, access to resources is granted on a need-to-know basis, and all traffic is monitored and controlled through the use of advanced security measures. Blocking untrusted traffic makes it very difficult for attackers to gain access to sensitive data, as they must first pass through multiple security controls before they can reach their intended target.

TrueNAS is designed with data protection and zero-trust security in mind. By combining security features in TrueNAS with IT best practices, you can create a highly resilient and secure architecture for your organization. Here are the steps you can take to create a zero-trust IT architecture integrating TrueNAS to protect, store, and manage your data:

Identify Assets: First, identify all of the assets that you need to protect. This may include servers, storage systems, networks, and other critical infrastructure.

Define Your Perimeter: Once you have identified your assets, you need to define your security perimeter. This will determine which resources are considered “inside” the perimeter and which are “outside.”

Use Microsegmentation: Microsegmentation involves breaking your network into smaller segments and applying security controls to each segment. This can help prevent attackers from moving laterally within your network and limit the damage they can do if they manage to gain access.

Implement Access Controls: TrueNAS allows you to set up fine-grained access controls for different users and groups and integrates with Active Directory / LDAP, so you can specify exactly who has access to which resources. This helps prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and limits the damage that an attacker can do if they manage to gain access to a user account on your system.

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Using two-factor authentication (2FA) in TrueNAS adds another layer of security. By requiring administrators to provide additional authentication with their password, you keep the many settings on your TrueNAS safe.

Encrypted Connections and Data: TrueNAS utilizes encrypted connections using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), so you can protect your data as it is transmitted over the network. This is especially important if you are storing sensitive data on your TrueNAS system.

TrueNAS also natively supports encrypted drives and datasets, providing additional security at the hardware and software levels respectively.

Monitoring, Auditing, and Analytics: TrueNAS includes several built-in tools for monitoring and auditing activity on the system. You can use these tools to keep track of who is accessing which resources and when and to identify any suspicious activity that might indicate an attempted breach.

Using TrueCommand, the single-pane-of-glass management solution for TrueNAS, you can set up additional features like role-based access control (RBAC) and robust auditing across your fleet to record all storage administration actions in secure audit logs. This helps quickly identify what changed and who changed it when troubleshooting any issues.TrueCommand analytics can be run locally, even on air-gapped systems, which are a requirement for many TrueNAS Enterprise customers.

TrueCommand is free to use for up to 50 drives, and commercial licenses can be purchased for larger deployments. For more information on TrueCommand, contact us or reach out to us through live chat.

Proactive Support: iXsystems offers proactive support with TrueNAS, allowing administrators to optionally send encrypted metadata to our expert TrueNAS Support Team. This gives extra peace of mind knowing that our storage experts will proactively reach out to you when certain errors are discovered.

By following these steps, you can create a zero-trust architecture and have the confidence to know that TrueNAS will help store and manage your data securely. Contact us or reach out to us through live chat to learn more about integrating TrueNAS into your business environment.

The post Using TrueNAS in a Zero-trust Architecture appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS appliances deliver unified storage and Apps in a pre-configured system with technical support services from iX. These appliances offer additional software capabilities such as high availability (HA), enclosure management, advanced security, and automated support. TrueNAS appliances have earned exceptional ratings among customers from businesses of all sizes, and are an ideal choice for anyone needing a well-supported and trouble-free environment.

The TrueNAS M-Series is the flagship HA system. It scales from 100TB to over 20PB in a single system and rack. The TrueNAS X-Series provides HA storage and is a small, quiet, and low power 2U system. The TrueNAS R-Series and Minis are non-HA systems for a wide range of use cases. Today iX has announced the addition of two new platforms to the TrueNAS appliance family.

TrueNAS R30 Delivers 30GB/s in 1U with NVMe Storage

TrueNAS R30 is designed for extreme performance density with 16 NVME drives in a compact 1U chassis. Typically configured with 32 Cores, 256GB of RAM, and up to 240TB of NVMe Flash, this system is ideal for the most demanding analytics and video editing workloads.

With 16 NVMe Gen4 SSDs per system and 2 dual-port 100GbE NICs, each node is capable of over 30GB/s bandwidth in a 1U 800W envelope. When configured in clusters, the R30 will provide extreme rack-level bandwidths for cluster file and object workloads.

The TrueNAS R30 is enabled by TrueNAS SCALE “Bluefin” which is now generally available. TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin provides improved clustering, better App support, and a well-proven ZFS implementation that delivers performance and reliability.

AX-1212 Virtualization Server simplifies VMware TrueNAS Deployments

AX-1212-64C is a 64 Core 1U server designed for virtualization and is certified for VMware. Typically configured with 512GB of RAM and 8 x 25 GbE ports, these servers deliver lower cost per vCPU and high bandwidth per VM.

These AMD Milan servers can be bundled with TrueNAS M-Series storage to support a turnkey virtualization environment with high density and power efficiency. These virtualization bundles are supported by iX and deliver significant savings with much simpler operations, including VAAI support and a vCenter plugin.

Small virtualization solutions with 4 servers and M-Series storage are available at less than $100K and support up to 500 VMs.

Announced earlier in October, the TrueNAS R50 (Gen 3) is a 4U system with 48 HDD bays and 4 NVMe drives. It has a modular controller that can be swapped and upgraded without taking the full system out of the rack. It is ideally suited to high-capacity clusters where each node can be easily serviced and upgraded without moving data. A single R50 can now support up to 1PB of capacity and 2 x 100 GbE ports.

All of these products are available immediately. For more information on these new TrueNAS appliances or our other products, please contact iX.

The post iX adds TrueNAS R30 and AX-1212 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Docker (and Kubernetes) uses an Overlay file system to manage the layers of pre-built container distribution images. Overlay file systems allow for creating a union mapping of two or more directories: a list of lower directories and an upper directory. The lower directories of the filesystem are read only, whereas the upper directory can be used for both reads and writes.

Until now, OpenZFS has not natively supported these Overlay filesystem primitives, and the result has been some major inefficiencies in how Linux Containers have scaled up. Last year, it became a high priority for iX to solve this limitation for future releases of SCALE. Recently, the new OverlayFS capability has passed its initial battery of testing and has landed in the RC1 release of SCALE 22.12 (Bluefin).

With this OverlayFS addition, OpenZFS becomes a superior file system for managing container storage. Not only is OverlayFS supported, but all the significant advantages of OpenZFS over other Linux file systems are inherited. The benefits inherited by TrueNAS SCALE include:

• Copy-on-Write snapshots and clones
• Integrated volume management with multiple RAID levels
• In-line compression, encryption, and deduplication
• Efficient, encrypted replication
• Effective Read and Write Caching
• On-line expansion and self-healing

TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin (22.12-RC.1) includes these major improvements to OpenZFS and is scheduled for November 15th. TrueNAS SCALE’s Application Infrastructure will automatically switch to using the OverlayFS container drivers and users should see an immediate improvement to CPU utilization and a minimization of on-disk dataset & snapshot utilization. Developers and testers can test using the latest nightly. TrueNAS SCALE users can expect to see a Bluefin RELEASE version at the end of 2022.

TrueNAS SCALE users will see much simpler operation of Docker Containers and Apps (Helm Charts). Both the built-in Apps and other community-run App Catalogs will benefit. System admins will see both improved performance and much less clutter when administering snapshots.

The OpenZFS software for this improvement has been contributed back to the OpenZFS community with the expectation it may become a standard capability of future OpenZFS releases as well as TrueNAS SCALE. The GitHub link for the OpenZFS-OverlayFS feature is here.

For more discussion on containers, check out our Community Forums and Discord Channel where you can post and collaborate. We also welcome any questions on TrueNAS appliances on our contact form or live chat on our websites.

The post iX Collaborates to add native OverlayFS Support to OpenZFS for Docker & Kubernetes 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.

The post TrueNAS 13.0-U3 Increases Maturity and Includes iX-Storj Service appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• 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.

The post The Modular TrueNAS R50 Stores a Petabyte appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

In July, we asked the TrueNAS Community to share their experiences in online reviews, offering awesome prizes to make it fun. Western Digital pitched in with five 14 TB Western Digital WD Red Plus NAS Drives for the TrueNAS Mini X grand prize. Congratulations to TrueNAS Community member Marino L. from New Jersey USA as the grand prize winner! In all: 299 new reviews were posted between July and September on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and Distrowatch.

As part of the campaign, we partnered with G2 Gives with the goal of raising $500 for World Central Kitchen, an organization that provides meals during humanitarian, climate, and community crises. For each review on G2, they donated $10. The TrueNAS community exceeded this goal, raising $1,210 for World Central Kitchen with G2 by contributing 121 reviews. In recognition of the time invested by our community members, iX is also matching the donation amount and sending a total of $2,420 to World Central Kitchen.

The G2 Gives part of the campaign is still available. For any community members that have not left a review, you can leave one using this link and unlock a $10 donation to World Central Kitchen.

TrueNAS has the highest rating and most reviews on the site for All-Flash Arrays (AFA), passing Pure Storage Flash Arrays, IBM FlashSystem, Dell EMC All-Flash Arrays, NetApp AFF A-Series, and HPE 3PAR. 

With no primary storage category on the site, TrueNAS is rated alongside iX friends Backblaze, Resilio, Rubrik, Storj, and Veeam in the backup software category, with more reviews than storage from Qumulo and VMware VSAN.

Shown here on a scale of 5, TrueNAS has the highest rating and most customer-verified reviews on the site for Network Attached Storage, passing IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems), NetApp FAS series, HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage, and Dell EMC PowerScale (EMC Isilon).

Want to see what others are saying about their TrueNAS experiences? Check out our updated reviews page, and consider sharing your experiences on any of the review sites to keep the momentum growing for the Open Storage Era!

The post Community Reviews Make TrueNAS the Highest Rated Storage and Support a Great Cause appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 13.0-U2 includes over 60 bug fixes and improvements, including:

• TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1 SMB fixes
• ZFS 2.1.5 updates
• SAMBA 4.15.9 updates
• SMB1 Security vulnerability resolution
• NextCloud plugin installation fixes
• Intel E810 NIC performance improvement
• Collected memory leak fix
• AWS S3 Secret Keys for Cloud Sync fix

The significant new components of TrueNAS 13.0 were described in the Release Blog:

• FreeBSD 13.0 performance security and efficiency improvements
• OpenZFS 2.1 performance and reliability improvements 
• Samba 4.15 security vulnerability resolution
• iSCSI target bandwidth increases
• NFS server: Improved NFS 4.x support

TrueNAS 13.0-U1 and TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1 (minor update for SMB fixes) have been widely and successfully deployed, and the Community has also reported that compatibility of plugins and jails with FreeBSD 13.0 has helped with many application updates. 

TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1 has already become the 2nd most popular version of TrueNAS, only 12.0-U8.1 is higher. TrueNAS users at Linus Tech Tips recently released a video detailing their 270 drive configuration build-out using TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1.

TrueNAS 13.0 is a single, unified image that supports either TrueNAS CORE or TrueNAS Enterprise capabilities. TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations that want a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, and professional support. It also includes Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP). TrueNAS 13.0 delivers a significant reduction (>95% in some cases) in failover times, which most users greatly appreciate.

TrueNAS 13.0-U2 is intended for mission-critical deployments

TrueNAS 13.0 has matured much more rapidly than previous TrueNAS releases. There is a TrueNAS 13.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this accelerated process and Community feedback. Tens of thousands of users have already reported a smooth software update experience from TrueNAS 12.0. For mission-critical workloads, TrueNAS Enterprise appliances with HA and support are recommended.

Please check out the TrueNAS 13.0 documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. Users can now comment on any documentation article. Please use this if you think the documentation is missing advice or needs more clarity.

When should you update your TrueNAS system?

This is the perennial question with the same reliable answer: “it depends”.

To address this with additional clarity, we have added a TrueNAS Software Status page that outlines the iX recommendations based on the type of user and how critical the workload is. Beta testers, early adopters, and mission critical users all have different needs and tolerances.

For example, TrueNAS 13.0-U2 is intended for mission critical deployments. However, our recommendation is that users choose to wait a few weeks for early user feedback before updating their software to 13.0-U2.

SMB users with security concerns should update from TrueNAS 12.0 to TrueNAS 13.0. TrueNAS makes it easy to update and roll back if there are any issues. Users are also encouraged to check the TrueNAS forums to see the experiences of other users.

Future updates to TrueNAS 13.0 will happen less frequently and will resolve issues seen in real deployments. The focus will be on increasing quality to the next level beyond TrueNAS 12.0. Users with storage-centric use cases (file, block, object) that are generally satisfied with TrueNAS 12.0 will find that upgrading to TrueNAS 13.0 will provide significant advantages without any major changes to features, data layout, tools, or user interface.

TrueNAS SCALE: The Path to Scale-out and Linux Support

Users of TrueNAS 12.0 and TrueNAS 13.0 also have an option to migrate to TrueNAS SCALE, which is based on Linux (Debian Bullseye). Users looking for scale-out storage capabilities and/or Linux-friendly hyperconvergence with Kubernetes and KVM should look at SCALE. The latest update, TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.3, was released in August and the next update will be available in October.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

For those with systems installed with TrueNAS 12.0, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 13.0 very easily. For new systems, download TrueNAS 13.0 and get started. TrueNAS Enterprise customers should contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating.

TrueNAS 13.0 security, quality, and performance improvements should positively impact your system(s). If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on our community forums, the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. 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.

The post TrueNAS 13.0-U2 Release Delivers Enterprise Quality appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Last year, Linus Tech Tips (LTT) chose TrueNAS for their high-performance video editing system that serves as the daily content creation machine for their enormously popular YouTube channels. After countless frustrations with Microsoft Windows Server (Storage Spaces), TrueNAS cured their storage headache, while also enabling them to increase both performance and reliability significantly. Over 3 Million people watched the video.

Last week, LTT announced they’d called on  TrueNAS yet again, this time to rebuild a major 3.6 petabyte (that’s 3,600 TB) Archive server. Everything went well and the project has been very successful. As of this posting, over 1.3 Million people have already watched the most recent video, and it’s as entertaining as all LTT videos, so we suggest you check it out. 

Please do not use their rack installation techniques at home or at work. They are professional IT stunt men who need a server lift.

OpenZFS simplified Data Migration

LTT began migrating their previous ZFS pool from 2015 into the new NAS system. The old pool (on tens of HDDs) and all its contents migrated seamlessly. The ZFS pool import capability is one of the compelling advantages of OpenZFS in TrueNAS. ZFS pool import allows pools to be migrated to a totally different NAS platform with the drives shuffled and installed in a different order, but the data is still protected, imported, and migrated.

TrueNAS CORE 13.0 was used for this project due to the scale-up architecture that was selected.

The TrueNAS M60 is a Great Archive Option

LTT operates on an extremely tight budget and built a custom solution for their archival server. TrueNAS software is provided free to anyone interested in DIY projects like this who doesn’t mind supporting and maintaining a system themselves. In this case, LTT used free drives and enclosures from other vendors to build a single controller NAS with 270 drives, and we don’t blame them!

For anyone who would be looking for a similar system with enterprise support, we would recommend a TrueNAS M60. This high-capacity model is available with either a single or dual controller and can scale up to 20 PB. The single controller TrueNAS M60 has about the same RAM, NVMe, and performance as the LTT build, but also has NVDIMMs for highest possible performance write caching.

The dual controller version of the M60 provides High Availability. Large systems like this one built by LTT, with hundreds of drives and multiple expansion shelves (JBODs), can be more susceptible to failures on account of the number of components and its complex connectivity. By contrast, the M60-HA significantly reduces the risk of service outages due to hardware failure and greatly reduces downtime when doing software updates. The M60 comes with TrueNAS Enterprise pre-installed and ready to take on high-performance workloads.

The TrueNAS M60 has been tested in configurations up to 1200 drives, about five times the size of the LinuxTech media deployment. Plus, iX provides professional deployment assistance and up to 24/7 support. Graphical enclosure management is available on all TrueNAS appliances and greatly simplifies operations.

Media Use Cases

LTT demonstrates the common use cases of Editing and Archival for Media and Entertainment workloads for which many customers and users also leverage TrueNAS. The next step is to link those systems and automate workflows. By using ZFS and TrueNAS, the ZFS replication tools can be configured to automatically protect the data and video footage in the Editing system and ensure the Archive system has a recent copy.  

Now that LTT has multiple TrueNAS systems protecting their precious footage, they are planning to use TrueCommand to help further simplify the management and monitoring of their growing storage fleet by providing unified management for all systems.

If you have any additional questions or need advice on a new media project, please contact us. We are standing by to help.

The post Linus Tech Tips Uses TrueNAS Again! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

ZFS RAID is not like traditional RAID. Its on-disk structure is far more sophisticated than that of a legacy RAID implementation and includes a wide array of data protection features. Because its on-disk structure is more robust, predicting how much usable capacity you’ll get from a set of hard disks with a given vdev (short for virtual device) layout is more complex. There are layers of data protection overhead that need to be understood and accounted for to get an accurate estimate. I’ve found that the best way to wrap one’s head around ZFS allocation overhead is to step through an example.

Let’s start by picking a less-than-ideal RAIDZ vdev layout so we can see the impact of all the various forms of ZFS overhead. Once we understand RAIDZ, understanding mirrored and striped vdevs will be simple. We’ll use 14 x 18TB drives in two 7-wide RAIDZ2 (7wZ2) vdevs. It will generally be easier for us to work in bytes so we don’t have to worry about conversion between TB and TiB.

Starting with the capacity of the individual drives, we’ll subtract the size of the swap partition. The swap partition acts as an extension of the system’s physical memory pool. If a running process needs more memory than is currently available, the system can unload some of its in-memory data onto the swap space. By default, TrueNAS creates a 2GiB swap partition on every disk in the data pool. Other products that use ZFS may create a larger or smaller swap partition, or it might not create one at all.

18 * 1000^4 – 2 * 1024^3 = 17997852516352 bytes

Next, we want to account for reserved sectors at the start of the disk. The layout and size of these reserved sectors will depend on your operating system and partition scheme, but we’ll use FreeBSD and GPT for this example because that is what TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise use. We can check sector alignment by running gpart list on one of the disks in the pool:

root@truenas[~]# gpart list da1

Geom name: da1

modified: false

state: OK

fwheads: 255

fwsectors: 63

last: 35156249959

first: 40

entries: 128

scheme: GPT

Providers:

1. 1. 1. Name: da1p1

  Mediasize: 2147483648 (2.0G)

  Sectorsize: 512

  Stripesize: 0

  Stripeoffset: 65536

  Mode: r0w0e0

  efimedia: HD(1,GPT,b1c0188e-b098-11ec-89c7-0800275344ce,0x80,0x400000)

  rawuuid: b1c0188e-b098-11ec-89c7-0800275344ce

  rawtype: 516e7cb5-6ecf-11d6-8ff8-00022d09712b

  label: (null)

  length: 2147483648

  offset: 65536

  type: freebsd-swap

  index: 1

  end: 4194431

  start: 128

1. 1. 2. Name: da1p2

  Mediasize: 17997852430336 (16T)

  Sectorsize: 512

  Stripesize: 0

  Stripeoffset: 2147549184

  Mode: r1w1e2

  efimedia: HD(2,GPT,b215c5ef-b098-11ec-89c7-0800275344ce,0x400080,0x82f39cce8)

  rawuuid: b215c5ef-b098-11ec-89c7-0800275344ce

  rawtype: 516e7cba-6ecf-11d6-8ff8-00022d09712b

  label: (null)

  length: 17997852430336

  offset: 2147549184

  type: freebsd-zfs

  index: 2

  end: 35156249959

  start: 4194432

Consumers:

1. 1. 1. Name: da1

  Mediasize: 18000000000000 (16T)

  Sectorsize: 512

  Mode: r1w1e3

First, note that the sector size used on this drive is 512 bytes. The first logical block on this disk is actually sector 40; that means 40 * 512 = 20480 bytes are subtracted.

The 1. Name: da1p1 section describes the swap partition on this drive. We can see it is 2GiB in size (as expected) and it starts at logical block address 128 (i.e., an offset of 512 * 128 = 65536 bytes). If we subtract this space from the expected partition size calculated above, we see it lines up with the actual on-disk partition size:

17997852516352 – 20480 – 65536 = 17997852430336 bytes

Before ZFS does anything with this partition, it rounds its size down to align with a 256KiB block. This rounded-down size is referred to as the osize or physical volume size of the disk in the ZFS code.

floor(17997852430336 / (256 * 1024)) * 256 * 1024 = 17997852311552 bytes

Inside the physical ZFS volume, we need to account for the special labels added to each disk. ZFS creates 4 copies of a 256KiB vdev label on each disk (2 at the start of the ZFS partition and 2 at the end) plus a 3.5MiB embedded boot loader region. Details on the function of the vdev labels can be found here and details on how the labels are sized and arranged can be found here and in the sections just below this (lines 541 and 548). We subtract this 4.5MiB (4 * 256KiB + 3.5MiB) of space from the ZFS partition to get its “usable” size:

17997852311552 – 4 * 262144 – 3670016 = 17997847592960 bytes

Next, we need to calculate the allocation size or “asize” of the whole vdev. We simply multiply the usable ZFS partition size by the vdev width here. We’re not accounting for parity space just yet:

17997847592960 * 7 = 125984933150720 bytes

That’s about 114.58 TiB. ZFS takes this chunk of storage represented by the allocation size and breaks it into smaller, uniformly-sized buckets called “metaslabs”. ZFS creates these metaslabs because they’re much more manageable than the full vdev size when tracking used and available space via spacemaps. The size of the metaslabs are primarily controlled by the metaslab shift or ms_shift variable with the target size being 2^ms_shift bytes. You can read more about metaslab sizing here.

ZFS sets ms_shift so that the quantity of metaslabs is under 200. ms_shift starts at 29 and grows as high as 34. Once ms_shift is 34, it doesn’t grow any larger but instead the metaslab count grows beyond 200. With an ms_shift value of 34, ZFS will create as many 16GiB metaslabs as it can fit in the vdev allocation size. 2^17 or 131,072 is the cap on the metaslab count (or ms_count); after that cap is hit, ZFS allows metaslabs to grow larger than 16GiB. This cap won’t be hit until your vdev allocation size is at least 2^17 * 16 GiB = 2 PiB. Again, that’s the size of an individual vdev, not the whole pool; you aren’t going to run into this unless you put more than 125 18TB disks in a single Z2 vdev.

On the other hand, the “cutoff” for going from ms_shift = 34 down to ms_shift = 33 is really pretty small, 1,600GiB or 1.5625TiB. In other words, unless your vdevs are smaller than 1.5625TiB, your pool’s ms_shift value will be 34. For our example, asize is well over 1.5625TiB so we have ms_shift = 34.

Once we have the value of ms_shift we can easily calculate the metaslab size by doing 2^ms_shift.

2 ^ 34 = 17179869184 bytes

With ms_shift = 34, the metaslab size will be 16GiB. We can note that if ms_shift was 33, the metaslab size would be 8GiB; the metaslab size gets cut in half each time ms_shift decreases by 1. We now need to figure out how many full 16GiB metaslabs will fit in each vdev, so we calculate asize / metaslab_size and round down using the floor() function (the 16GiB metaslab size is represented in bytes below):

floor(125984933150720 / 17179869184) = 7333

This gives us 7,333 metaslabs per vdevs. We can check our progress so far on an actual ZFS system by using the zdb command provided by ZFS. We can check vdev size and the metaslab shift value by running zdb -C $pool_name and we can check metaslab count by running zdb -m $pool_name. Note on TrueNAS, you’ll need to add the -U /data/zfs/zpool.cache option (i.e., zdb -U /data/zfs/zpool.cache -C $pool_name and zdb -U /data/zfs/zpool.cache -m $pool_name).

root@truenas[~]# zdb -U /data/zfs/zpool.cache -C tank

MOS Configuration:

       version: 5000

       name: 'tank'

       state: 0

       txg: 11

       pool_guid: 7584042259335681111

       errata: 0

       hostid: 3601001416

       hostname: ''

       com.delphix:has_per_vdev_zaps

       vdev_children: 2

       vdev_tree:

           type: 'root'

           id: 0

           guid: 7584042259335681111

           create_txg: 4

           children[0]:

               type: 'raidz'

               id: 0

               guid: 2993118147866813004

               nparity: 2

               metaslab_array: 268

               metaslab_shift: 34

               ashift: 12

               asize: 125984933150720

               is_log: 0

               create_txg: 4

               com.delphix:vdev_zap_top: 129

               children[0]:

                   type: 'disk'

... (output truncated) ...

root@truenas[~]# zdb -U /data/zfs/zpool.cache -m tank

Metaslabs:

       vdev          0      ms_unflushed_phys object 270

       metaslabs  7333   offset                spacemap          free

       ---------------   -------------------   ---------------   ------------

       metaslab      0   offset            0   spacemap    274   free    16.0G

space map object 274:

 smp_length = 0x18

 smp_alloc = 0x12000

       Flush data:

       unflushed txg=5

       metaslab      1   offset    400000000   spacemap    273   free    16.0G

space map object 273:

 smp_length = 0x18

 smp_alloc = 0x21000

       Flush data:

       unflushed txg=6

... (output truncated) ...

ZFS reserves one metaslab per “normal class” vdev (meaning not from cache vdevs, etc) for an “embedded SLOG”, but this is not factored into capacity calculations. More info on that here.

To calculate useful space in our vdev, we multiply the metaslab size by the metaslab count. This means that space within the ZFS partition but not covered by one of the metaslabs isn’t useful to us and is effectively lost. In theory, by using a smaller ms_shift value, we could recover a bit of this space, but we would end up using a lot more system memory so it’s not really worth it. With 7,333 metaslabs at 16GiB per metaslab, we have:

17179869184 * 7333 = 125979980726272 bytes

That’s about 114.58 TiB of useful space per vdev. If we multiply that by the quantity of vdevs, we get the ZFS pool size:

125979980726272 * 2 = 251959961452544 bytes

We can confirm this by running zpool list:

root@truenas[~]# zpool list -p -o name,size,alloc,free tank

NAME             SIZE    ALLOC             FREE

tank  251959961452544  1437696  251959960014848

The -p flag shows exact (parsable) byte values and the -o flag determines what properties will be displayed (without the flag, it outputs a bunch of stuff that’s not relevant for this and the table text wraps and becomes almost unreadable).

Note that the zpool SIZE value matches what we calculated above. We’re going to set this number aside for now and calculate RAIDZ parity and padding. Before we proceed, it will be helpful to review a few ZFS basics including ashift, minimum block size, how partial-stripe writes work, and the ZFS recordsize value.

Hard disks and SSDs divide their space into tiny logical storage buckets called “sectors”. A sector is usually 4KiB but could be 512 bytes on older hard drives or 8KiB on some SSDs. A sector represents the smallest read or write a disk can do in a single operation. ZFS tracks disks’ sector size as the ashift where 2^ashift = sector size (so ashift = 9 for 512 byte sectors, 12 for 4KiB sectors, 13 for 8KiB sectors).

In RAIDZ, the smallest useful write we can make is p+1 sectors wide where p is the parity level (1 for RAIDZ1, 2 for Z2, 3 for Z3). This gives us a single sector of user data and the required number of parity sectors to protect that user data. With this in mind, ZFS allocates space on RAIDZ vdevs in even multiples of this p+1 value to maximize capacity and prevent unusable-small gaps on the disk. For example, imagine we made a 5-sector write to a RAIDZ2 vdev (3 user data sectors and 2 parity sectors). We later delete that data and are left with a 5-sector gap on the disk. We now make a 3-sector write to the Z2 vdev, it lands in that 5-sector gap and we have a 2-sector gap that we can’t do anything with. That space can’t be recovered without totally rewriting every other sector on the disk after it.

To avoid this, ZFS will pad out all writes to RAIDZ vdevs so they’re an even multiple of this p+1 value. By “pad out” we mean it just logically includes these extra few sectors in the block to be written but doesn’t actually write anything to them. The ZFS source code refers to them as “skip” sectors.

Unlike traditional RAID5 and RAID6 implementations, ZFS supports partial-stripe writes. This has a number of important advantages but also presents some implications for space calculation that we’ll need to consider. Supporting partial stripe writes means that in our 7wZ2 vdev example, we can support a write of 12 total sectors even though 12 is not an even multiple of our stripe width (7). 12 is evenly divisible by p+1 (which is 3 in this case because we’re using RAIDZ2), so we don’t even need any padding. We would have a single full stripe of 7 sectors (2 parity sectors plus 5 data sectors) followed by a partial stripe with 2 parity sectors and 3 data sectors. This will be important because even though we can support partial stripe writes, every stripe (including those partial stripes) need a full set of p parity sectors.

The last ZFS concept we need to understand here is the recordsize value. The ZFS recordsize value is used to determine the largest block of data ZFS can write out. It can be set per-dataset and can be any even power of 2 from 512 bytes up to 1MiB. The default recordsize value is 128KiB. For capacity estimation purposes, ZFS always assumes a 128KiB record. It’s important to note that this recordsize value only considers user data, not parity or padding. It’s also worth mentioning that block sizes in ZFS will vary based on how much data needs to be written out and the recordsize value enforces the upper limit of that block size, but again, ZFS assumes all 128KiB records for space calculation purposes, so we will use that value going forward.

You can read more about ZFS’ handling of partial stripe writes and block padding in this article by Matt Ahrens.

Getting back to our capacity example, we have the minimum sector count already calculated above at p+1 = 3. Next, we need to figure out how many sectors will get filled up by a recordsize write (128KiB here).

128 * 1024 / 4096 = 32 sectors

Our stripe width is 7 disks, so we can figure out how many stripes this 128KiB write will take. Remember, we need 2 parity sectors per stripe, so we divide the 32 sectors by 5 because that’s the number of data sectors per stripe:

32 / (7-2) = 6.4 stripes

We can visualize how this might look on the disks (P represents a parity sectors, D represents a data sectors):

As mentioned above, that partial 0.4 stripe also gets 2 parity sectors, so we have 7 stripes of parity data at 2 parity sectors per stripe, or 14 total parity sectors. We now have 32 data sectors, 14 parity sectors, adding those, we get 46 total sectors for this data block. 46 is not an even multiple of our minimum sector count (3), so we need to add 2 padding sectors. This brings our total sector count to 48: 32 data sectors, 14 parity sectors, and 2 padding sectors.

With the padding sectors included, this is what the full 128KiB block might look like on disk. I’ve drawn two blocks so you can see how alignment of the second block gets shifted a bit to accommodate the partial stripe we’ve written. The X’s represent the padding sectors.

This probably looks strange because we have one parity sector at the start of the second block just hanging out by itself. Even though it’s not on the same exact row as the data it’s protecting, it’s still providing that protection. ZFS knows where that parity data is written so it doesn’t really matter what LBA it gets written to, as long as it’s on the correct disk.

We can calculate a data storage efficiency ratio by dividing our 32 data sectors by the 48 total sectors it takes to store them on disk with this particular vdev layout.

32 / 48 = 0.66667

ZFS uses something similar to this ratio when allocating space but in order to simplify calculations and avoid multiplication overflows and other weird stuff it tracks this ratio as a fraction of 512. In other words, to more accurately represent how ZFS “sees” the on-disk space, we need to convert the 32/48 fraction to the nearest fraction of 512. We’ll need to round down to get a whole number in the numerator (the top part of the fraction). To do this, we calculate:

floor(0.66667 * 512) / 512 = 0.666015625 = 341/512

This 341/512 fraction is called the vdev_deflate_ratio and it’s what we’ll multiply the pool size calculated above by in order to get usable space per vdev after parity and padding. You can read a bit more on the vdev_deflat_ratio here.

251959961452544 * 0.666015625 = 167809271201792 bytes

The last thing we need to account for is SPA slop space. ZFS reserves the last little bit of pool capacity “to ensure the pool doesn’t run completely out of space due to unaccounted changes (e.g. to the MOS)”. Normally this is 1/32 of the usable pool capacity with a minimum value of 128MiB. OpenZFS 2.0.7 also introduced a maximum limit to slop space of 128GiB (this is good; slop space used to be HUGE on large pools). You can read about SPA slop space reservation here.

For our example pool, slop space would be…

167809271201792 * 1/32 = 5244039725056 bytes

That’s 4.77 TiB reserved for SPA slop and an incredible investment in data protection and durability. If we’re running OpenZFS 2.0.7 or later, we’ll use 128 GiB instead:

167809271201792 - 128 * 1024^3 = 167671832248320 bytes

= 156156.5625 GiB

= 152.4966 TiB

And there we have it! This is the total usable capacity of a pool of 14x 18TB disks configured in 2x 7wZ2. We can confirm the calculations using zfs list:

root@truenas[~]# zfs list -p tank

NAME     USED            AVAIL     REFER  MOUNTPOINT

tank  1080288  167671831168032    196416  /mnt/tank

As with the zpool list command, the -p flag shows exact byte values.

167671831168032 + 1080288 = 167671832248320 bytes

= 156156.5625 GiB 

= 152.4966 TiB

By adding the USED and AVAIL values, we can confirm that our calculation is accurate.

Mirrored vdevs work in a similar way but the vdev asize is just a single drive’s capacity (minus zfs labels and whatnot) and then the vdev_deflate_ratio is just 512/512 or 1.0. We skip all the parity and padding sector stuff but we do still need to account for metaslab allocation and SPA slop space.

This example used VirtualBox with virtual 18TB disks that hold exactly 18,000,000,000,000 bytes. Real disks won’t have such an exact physical capacity; the 8TB disks in my TrueNAS system hold 8,001,563,222,016 bytes. If you run through these calculations on a real system with physical disks, I recommend checking the exact disk and partition capacity using gpart or something similar.

It’s worth noting that none of these calculations factor in any data compression. The effect of compression on storage capacity is almost impossible to predict without running your data through the compression algorithm you intend to use. At iX, we typically see between 1.2:1 and 1.6:1 reduction assuming the data is compressible in the first place.

We’re also ignoring the effect that variable block sizes will have on functional pool capacity. We used a 128 KiB block because that’s the ZFS default and what it uses for available capacity calculations, but (as discussed above) ZFS may use a different block size for different data. A different block size will change the ratio of data sectors to parity+padding sectors so overall storage efficiency might change. The calculator above includes the ability to set a recordsize value and calculate capacity based on a pool full of blocks that size. You can experiment with different recordsize values to see its effects on efficiency. Changing a dataset’s recordsize value will have effects on performance as well, so read up on it before tinkering. You can find a good high-level discussion of recordsize tuning here, a more detailed technical discussion here, and a great generalized workload tuning guide here on the OpenZFS docs page.

The post Understanding ZFS Capacity in TrueNAS: How ZFS Turns Disks into Usable Storage Space appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The responses we received were largely positive across the board. We also received some great feedback and input on desired improvements and features for our products. iX is different, and we take pride in the success of our customer-centric approach. “Thinking people before profit”, we strive to help customers choose what is best for their environment, with clear and simple pricing and no hidden fees or upcharges.  Word of mouth from our satisfied customers will always be our best sales tool.

Of course, our interactions following purchase and deployment are just as important. In the survey, customers scored our Support Team highly. Again more than 90% of responses said they had a good or excellent experience, with several comments of praise for the knowledge and professionalism of the iX Support Team. Based on the “iXperience” built into TrueNAS Enterprise and provided by our support and sales teams, 4 out of 5 customers said they would recommend iXsystems to a friend or colleague. A similar percentage of customers said they would recommend TrueNAS Enterprise to someone in the market for storage.

In terms of the product itself, a majority 88% of customers reported a good or excellent experience using TrueNAS Enterprise systems. The open development model of TrueNAS allows for more transparency while delivering on our promise of true data freedom. This ultimately results in a product that delivers better stability, performance, and security without vendor lock-in or artificially-imposed limits, usually at a much better price.

While we are generally happy with these scores, we are never satisfied. We will continue to invest in areas to meet or exceed customer expectations, and prioritize feedback as we continually improve. We are following up with any customer respondents who had anything less than a positive experience to learn more about how we can improve things for them and future customers while hopefully earning their recommendation in the future.

From the survey, the most requested areas of improvement for TrueNAS have been included in the backlog of features and capabilities that feed our Engineering Roadmap. The top six areas that our customers want us to focus on are:

1. Backup Integration
2. VMware Integration
3. Hardware Improvements
4. General Ease of Use
5. Documentation (Related to HA setup, installation, and replication)
6. Clustering (coming in TrueNAS SCALE!)

We also received some feedback that we have taken to heart. Some of the common requests included things like faster support response times, NFS enhancements, and more advanced reporting. Expect us to invest in these areas as we strive to keep our customers highly satisfied, and work to earn a high score from all who buy TrueNAS Enterprise. 

A big thank you again to our customers for taking part in our survey. What’s more, everyone at iX is grateful for the business we earn from our customers. We have our customers to thank for being recognized as the fastest-growing storage systems vendor in 2021 and one of only two Open Source companies in the Top 25. We look forward to ongoing collaboration and doing great things together in the future. Thanks again for your help and feedback thus far!

The post Results of TrueNAS Enterprise Customer Experience Survey appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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.

Capabilities that were previously IPv4-only are now being made available via IPv6. Examples of these are:

• Software updates via the WebUI in CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE
• Pro-active support in TrueNAS Enterprise
• HA dual-controllers in TrueNAS SCALE

Why is IPv6 Interesting?

IPv6 is the Internet’s solution to the 32-bit addressing limitation of IPv4. The shorter 32-bit addresses are both hard to acquire and less structured. It’s difficult to determine the organization or country that an end-point comes from.  IPv6 addresses are 128-bit and very structured. They are expressed in groups of 4 hexadecimals, which makes them less readable that the typical IPv4 address (e.g 192.168.0.1).

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With 128-bits, IPv6 addresses are split into a network (64-bit) and node (64-bit). The network address is split into 48-bits for the global organization. The Global Unicast addresses are assigned as blocks to ISPs, who then allocate them to their customers.  Organizations can then assign the Local subnet IDs and route them within their own VPNs. Many large organizations and ISPs find that security is much simpler with this model.

Adoption of IPv6 has been steadily rising to the point where some organizations are becoming IPv6 only. Google provides statistics on access via IPv6 and now sees over 35% of its traffic using IPv6.

TrueNAS Fully Embraces IPv6-Only

Looking at this uptake and the technical benefits of a larger Internet, TrueNAS must embrace IPv6 and enable users to fully utilize this technology without a dual-stack approach. The major IPv6-only improvements being made are:

Software Updates: Previously, IPv6 users could download a new iso and apply a software update. Now, the webUI will connect to the update server and provide the point-and-click experience for new updates in TrueNAS CORE, Enterprise, or SCALE.

Pro-active Support: For users with Enterprise Support contracts, the Proactive support system will now be able to connect via IPv6 to iX’s support systems.  Drive failures, power events, and temperature alerts will all be automatically communicated without the need for IPv4.

High Availability: The HA with TrueNAS Enterprise relies on the CARP protocol that was engineered for IPv4. With the rewrite of HA for TrueNAS SCALE and Linux, that protocol has been re-engineered to support IPv6. This enables HA without a dual-stack model. Enterprise customers with a strong intention to move to IPv6 will be encouraged to use TrueNAS SCALE rather than TrueNAS 13.0.

There will be other projects that can make better use of IPv6, including TrueCommand. These will be tackled in future releases. Let us know of any other issues that impact you.

Contact us

The TrueNAS IPv6  improvements should have a positive impact on your IPv6 systems. 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, contact us. 

The post TrueNAS Facilitates the Transition to IPv6-Only appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Our TrueNAS Minis have always been a storage powerhouse. Mini but mighty and now, even mightier! With the integration of 18 TB WD Red Pro drives, TrueNAS Minis are now configurable to support more than 100 TB, allowing you to store more video footage and data with a minimal footprint.

More Power and Value for Your Money

When it comes to value, choosing TrueNAS is the right decision. With full NAS systems as low as $50/TB at >1W per TB, you get increased capacity along with effective power efficiency, less power at a lower cost, without sacrificing quality. You get the tried and tested maturity of TrueNAS software with the support from iXsystems and the devoted community who put their trust in TrueNAS.

TrueNAS and WD Red Pro

Western Digital is a long-standing partner of iXsystems and the WD Red Plus and WD Red Pro drives are the preferred drive for the TrueNAS Mini product line. These Western Digital HDDs are purpose-built, optimized, and tested for demanding NAS applications. They are engineered to handle heavy workloads so that users can stream, back up, organize their digital content, and manage data like a pro.

“We are honored to have these latest high-capacity drives included in the TrueNAS Mini products. The 18 TB Red Pro drives enable best in class capacity and a power profile that enables the Minis to be whisper quiet.” -David Jarvis, Senior Account Executive for Western Digital

TrueNAS Minis are compact and whisper-quiet when it comes to storing your valuable data in a secure environment. Now with the ability to be configured to more than 100 TB, allowing you to store more while maintaining a small form factor. Let TrueNAS safeguard what matters to you most by bringing professional-grade data protection and storage capabilities to your home or office. 

For a full specification table and drives compatibility list, please visit our Mini page at TrueNAS.com.

Ready to protect your valuable data with TrueNAS? Configure & Buy

The post TrueNAS Minis Store More Than 100TB! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

iXsystems is excited and delighted to welcome Linux users to join the TrueNAS Community. All of the excellent TrueNAS tools like OpenZFS, Snapshots, Replication, REST APIs, WebUI, Samba with Windows ACLs, High Availability, Enclosure Management, and Single-click software updates are now joined by the standard Linux toolchain and a familiar Debian Linux system environment. We invite all Linux admins, users, and enthusiasts to try it for themselves and come join the TrueNAS Community.

TrueNAS SCALE is still TrueNAS…plus MAJOR additions

TrueNAS SCALE is the culmination of an almost three-year collaborative effort from the iXsystems engineering team and the TrueNAS Community.  The journey started with iXsystems contributions in promoting the combination of both Linux and FreeBSD as the primary OSes for OpenZFS 2.0. This allowed the TrueNAS middleware to be ported between both OS’s, with the goal of eventually supporting existing TrueNAS features atop a Linux base to unlock several Linux-specific capabilities, including Docker Containers, Kubernetes, KVM, and also Scale-out ZFS through the gluster file system. 

TrueNAS SCALE’s set of additional features and capabilities enable TrueNAS to provide Open Source Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and Scale-out Unified Storage. Through the use of Linux, TrueNAS SCALE can live up to its acronym:

The TrueNAS SCALE path to Release

The path from development to ALPHA, then BETA, RC, and now RELEASE has taken 18 months of development and an extensive testing effort. Over 10,000 TrueNAS Community users have participated and tested on their widely varying hardware platforms and VMs. A successful three month RELEASE CANDIDATE (RC) stage with its two QA cycles completed the path to RELEASE. The lifecycle of TrueNAS SCALE, including the growth to 10,000 users is outlined below.

The RELEASE stage is the major milestone in our software lifecycle which enables customers to start building and deploying systems for business use. At RELEASE, iXsystems offers standard Enterprise support contracts. We look forward to working with our partners and customers over the coming months.

iXsystems is contributing significantly to Linux

While many applications port easily from FreeBSD to Linux, TrueNAS leverages many OS tools to provide an appliance-like experience. Adding a new OS, integrating it effectively, and then making sure it is rock solid and reliable is no small feat. The iXsystems engineering team and the many TrueNAS Community contributors and testers have collectively spent hundreds of development years making this release possible. Sincerest thanks to all who collaborated with us on this incredible journey!

Highlights of the many iXsystems technical contributions to TrueNAS SCALE include:

OpenZFS 2.0: The inclusion of FreeBSD and Linux as a thoroughly tested peer in OpenZFS enabled the migration of data between TrueNAS CORE to TrueNAS SCALE. Both the development and testing processes were contributed by iXsystems. After completing the OpenZFS 2.0 integration, iXsystems has contributed many scalability improvements, including a major reduction of pool import times in large systems.

Windows ACLs on Linux: By default, Linux only supports POSIX.1e ACLs which are a small subset of Windows (NFSv4) ACLs.  The iXsystems addition of NFSv4 ACLs on OpenZFS within Linux enables much better SMB sharing compatibility with Windows.

Scale-out OpenZFS: iXsystems is integrating the Gluster File System and OpenZFS to create a system with the properties of scale-out ZFS. Recent contributions include the ability to tie Gluster and OpenZFS snapshots together, which will appear in the next release, known as “Bluefin”.

Kubernetes Apps: iXsystems migrated the Apps capability from FreeBSD Jails/Plugins to a Kubernetes infrastructure with Helm Charts and support for Docker Containers and pods. Partners such as TrueCharts.org have further enabled large catalogs of applications to be available to the user community.

CLI and GUI Usability: TrueNAS SCALE included a more efficient WebUI that lets users configure and view more settings on a single web page. The Command-Line Interface (CLI) has been enhanced with a TrueNAS CLI that lets users harness all the power of the TrueNAS REST APIs from a text console.

The changes in TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.0

The feature set for TrueNAS 22.02 is described in the TrueNAS SCALE datasheet, and the TrueNAS SCALE documentation provides most of what you need to know to build and run your first systems. If you are missing some information or need advice, the TrueNAS Community forums provide a great source of information and community.

The details of TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.0 are in the release notes. There are over 300 new bug fixes and improvements that will provide a significant quality jump from the RC2 version. Notable inclusions are:

• Better integration with third-party app repositories, such as TrueCharts. 
• Ability to ‘sidegrade” from TrueNAS CORE to SCALE
• Full NFSv4 ACL support on both NFS and SMB protocols
• M-Series Enclosure Management
• High Availability (dual-controller) initial support
• Customizable Dashboard page
  

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in bringing TrueNAS SCALE to life! The assistance in finding and resolving bugs has been invaluable. It’s been quite an exciting ride, and there’s much more to come, so please keep reporting bugs and making suggestions as we continue to improve the quality of TrueNAS SCALE together. 

Who Should Use TrueNAS SCALE?

At this RELEASE stage of its Software Development Lifecycle, TrueNAS SCALE is primarily for home usage, smaller projects, and tech labs. It is particularly well suited to users with Linux Apps and Virtualization requirements in addition to standard storage needs. Users with scale-out storage requirements can start testing for their specific use-cases or interests.

For Linux developers, there are many opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project, and we have a vibrant Discord Community for contributors.  It is a well-coordinated and managed environment to collaborate in developing the best open hyperconverged infrastructure as a collective. Bluefin is the next major release after SCALE 22.02. It will include some major enhancements including scale-out ZFS snapshots and replication, clustered Kubernetes, and clustered hypervisors. For more information, see this community post.  

For larger commercial users with scale-out needs, iXsystems has a trial support program to support specific deployments and applications before they complete testing and enter the production phase. Please contact your iXsystems Account Representative, or email us at info@iXsystems.com if you are interested in trialing TrueNAS SCALE. 

Production users with standard NAS (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, S3) requirements are still advised to use TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise, which have a hundred times more data under management and over ten years of operation and stability. TrueNAS SCALE has inherited some of that maturity and the automated testing but has not yet completed its enterprise software quality lifecycle. In parallel, TrueNAS CORE 13.0 has also started its journey with a BETA release.

If you have any additional questions or need advice on a new project, please contact us. We are standing by to help.

The post First Official RELEASE of TrueNAS on Linux! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 13.0 and TrueNAS SCALE are the successors of the very successful unification of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into TrueNAS 12.0. TrueNAS 13.0 is focused on continuing the scale-up storage capabilities of TrueNAS 12.0.

The significant new components of TrueNAS 13.0 are:

TrueNAS 12.0-U8 middleware: TrueNAS 13.0 is based on the TrueNAS 12.0-U8 middleware and includes thousands of bug fixes and general quality improvements. There will be very few UI and API changes that will enable the automated testing to verify the quality of the TrueNAS 13.0 software. We are expecting higher quality than a typical major release.

FreeBSD 13.0: The Operating System (OS) is updated to FreeBSD 13.0 and includes thousands of improvements and many iXsystems contributions. Released in April 2021, this OS includes many improvements to cryptography, networking, drivers, and NUMA scheduling. Overall, Phoronix found significant performance improvements.

OpenZFS 2.1: The improvements in OpenZFS 2.0 were greatly appreciated in TrueNAS 12.0. OpenZFS 2.1, released in July 2021, has many more improvements in reliability and performance. Altogether, there are hundreds of updates and bug fixes. One particular contribution made by iXsystems reduces the ZFS pool import times. By making the process more parallel, system restart times and failover times can be significantly reduced for larger systems.

Samba 4.15: The most commonly used service on TrueNAS is SMB and is provided via Samba.org. The latest Samba 4.15 release has some security improvements and virtual file system improvements that ensure SMB support is stable and fast on 13.0.

iSCSI target: iSCSI includes support for larger native I/O sizes and general performance improvements. There will be a more detailed analysis of performance improvements closer to the RELEASE date.

Other minor improvements include:

• Intel I225 (2.5 Gbe) NIC support
• Various 12.0 bug fixes that were too complicated to resolve in a minor update

Progress Toward TrueNAS 13.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 13.0 is going through an accelerated delivery of the BETA1, RC1, RELEASE, and UPDATE stages. It will mature faster than TrueNAS 12.0 or TrueNAS SCALE. There is a TrueNAS 13.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this accelerated process and Community feedback.

The new TrueNAS 13.0 documentation is based on the TrueNAS 12.0 docs which were more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. 

The upgrades from TrueNAS 12.0 to TrueNAS 13.0 are expected to be very smooth due to the consistency of the software architecture. TrueNAS 12.0 enabled the merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image and the new truenas.com website. FreeNAS has morphed into TrueNAS CORE and the general quality has improved with the consolidation of the CORE and Enterprise images. With the last update of TrueNAS 12.0-U8, over 85% of systems have updated from TrueNAS and FreeNAS 11.x. 

TrueNAS SCALE: The Path to Scale-out and Linux Support

TrueNAS 12.0 users also have an option to migrate to TrueNAS SCALE.  TrueNAS SCALE also supports Samba 4.15 and OpenZFS 2.1 but is based on Debian Bullseye and not FreeBSD. 

Users looking for scale-out storage capabilities and/or Linux-friendly hyperconvergence with Kubernetes and KVM should look at SCALE. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 is expected to hit the RELEASE stage in February.

Users with storage-centric use cases (file, block, object) that are generally satisfied with TrueNAS 12.0 will find that the TrueNAS 13.0 upgrade provides significant advantages without any major changes to data layout, tools, or user interface.

TrueCommand is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0, SCALE, and TrueNAS 13.0 include support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks. TrueCommand 2.1 is the latest release and includes:

• Storage navigation of datasets, files across multiple NAS systems. 
• Real-time per-second statistics.
• Role-Based and Team-Based Access Controls (RBAC).
• Tracking and reporting inventory with serial numbers and support status. 
• Two-Factor Authentication and Single Sign-On. 

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

TrueNAS 13.0 security, quality, and performance improvements should have a positive impact on your systems. 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, email us. 

For those with TrueNAS 12.0 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 13.0 BETA with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 13.0 BETA and get started. TrueNAS Enterprise customers should wait for TrueNAS 13.0 RELEASE and contact iXsystems support before updating.

The post TrueNAS 13.0 BETA Improves Scale-up Unified Storage appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 12.0 has been very successful and over 85% of FreeNAS 11.3 users have already upgraded to TrueNAS CORE. TrueNAS 12.0 has now exceeded two exabytes (EB) of data under management and is growing at the astounding rate of 1 EB every 6 months.  

TrueNAS 12.0: a Retrospective

While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases.  The history of TrueNAS 12.0 releases has been:

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020, and included many new features and performance enhancements, along with OpenZFS 2.0 support and a major OS update to FreeBSD 12.2, which also broadened hardware compatibility.

TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled features like Fusion pools and efficient scrubbing/resilvering.

TrueNAS 12.0-U2 was released in February and included bug fixes with some minor features. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released April 13, 2021, and included bug fixes with some minor features.  This release was officially ready for mission-critical users.

TrueNAS 12.0-U4 was released June 1, 2021, and included bug fixes with robustness improvements. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released August 3, 2021, and included bug fixes, python upgrades, and security improvements.  This version has been very stable and is considered the best production version, including all previous FreeNAS versions.

TrueNAS 12.0-U6 was released on October 5, 2021, and included a number of fixes, nearly a dozen improvements, and a few platform enhancements. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U7 was released on December 7, 2021, and also includes a number of fixes, nearly a dozen more improvements, and a few platform enhancements. These include:

• • OpenZFS 2.0.6
  • More extensive SMB regression testing with various SMB options
  • Ongoing improvements to UI & middleware performance for large drive counts
  • Dashboard fixes for CPU temp reporting
  • Various M-Series and R-Series webUI improvements

A Glimpse into the Future with TrueNAS 13.0

TrueNAS 13.0 is the next planned release after TrueNAS 12.0-U7. It will include some major component upgrades which will offer new features, performance improvements, bug fixes, and security improvements. The major component changes will include:

• • FreeBSD 13-STABLE
  • OpenZFS 2.1.1
  • SAMBA 4.15

TrueNAS 13.0 will primarily be focused on its role as very stable enterprise storage and there will be very few webUI changes. TrueNAS 13.0 nightlies will begin this month and BETA will start early in 2022. There will be additional information provided prior to BETA. We look forward to working with the community to make this a smooth release and upgrade.

TrueCommand 2.0 is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0, SCALE, and TrueNAS 13.0 include support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks. TrueCommand 2.0 includes:

• • Storage navigation of datasets, files across multiple NAS systems. 
  • Real-time per-second statistics.
  • Role-Based and Team-Based Access Controls  (RBAC).
  • Tracking and reporting inventory with serial numbers and support status.

  

TrueCommand inventory view of TrueNAS systems

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS still installed on your systems, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first from within the web interface, and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U7 to retain roll-back options.  While it is an easy web update, we do recommend waiting to update your system’s zpool feature flags until you have validated your performance and functionality.  New users will want to simply download TrueNAS 12.0-U7 to get started.

TrueNAS Hardware Platforms

TrueNAS 12.0-U7 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High Availability (HA) M-Series. There is also an R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.  All of these can be updated via the web UI and include graphical enclosure management.

For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 is planned for release in February.

TrueNAS 12.0 users will have a choice of upgrading to TrueNAS 13.0 or TrueNAS SCALE whenever they like.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 “Angelfish”  is intended for RELEASE in February 2022 while TrueNAS SCALE 22.02-RC2 is expected to be available later this month. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02-RC1 already has over 5,500 users and is getting some great reviews. 

TrueNAS CORE is the Best-Ever Free NAS

The improvements to TrueNAS further strengthen its position as the best-ever “free NAS” system available. In that way, TrueNAS still is and always will be FreeNAS in spirit.  

Please check out the updated TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage the community to keep the suggestions coming!

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, or visit truenas.com and download the TrueNAS version that best fits your needs.

Here’s to True data freedom!

The post TrueNAS 12.0-U7 is Released & TrueNAS 13.0 Begins appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Together, Nextcloud and TrueNAS combine to provide a very complete private cloud infrastructure with both data storage and a suite of team collaboration services like document creation, chat, email, conferencing, calendaring, and several others. The combination is Open Source and self-hosted for maximum privacy and security. Unlike public cloud services (e.g. G-Suite, Office 365), an organization’s data can be securely managed onsite without any third-party backdoors. The HA and integrated replication capabilities of TrueNAS allow very reliable infrastructure to be built that is less dependent on Internet access bandwidth or reliability.

Nextcloud Hub is a collaboration platform designed to be self-hosted for complete privacy and cost control. The applications included are:

Nextcloud Files: Share and sync documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, and any other type of documents. With Collabora Online (included), multiple users can edit documents in real-time. Data can be accessed via the web or Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android clients.

Nextcloud Talk: Video and audio conferencing, combined with chat and whiteboarding, increase remote productivity in the new telecommuting era.

Nextcloud Groupware: Calendars, webmail, and task management are integrated with Files and Talk so teams can collaborate both within and across organizations.

TrueNAS is a software-defined storage platform which provides file, block, object, and app storage built on top of OpenZFS. The powerful enterprise capabilities of TrueNAS include:

Data Management: Built into TrueNAS CORE, OpenZFS provides continuous integrity checks and self-healing, along with RAID functions, snapshots, clones, and replication of data.

Integrated Security: Encryption of data-at-rest is managed with admin-provided keys or integration with enterprise KMIP servers. Integrated VPNs and encrypted replication provide protection from hackers.

High Availability (HA): Downtime impacts productivity and is unacceptable to larger organizations. TrueNAS Enterprise provides dual-controller options (X-Series and M-Series) to deliver “five nines” availability (equivalent to downtime of less than 5 minutes per year).

Scalability: Scale up to 20 PB in a single one-rack system or scale out to even larger systems with TrueNAS SCALE. Most importantly, there is no need to pay excessively for users with high capacity needs due to photos or videos.

Unified Storage: While Nextcloud will manage a lot of data for the organization, the same TrueNAS may also manage NFS, SMB, iSCSI, or S3 data for other applications and backup systems.

An official Nextcloud plugin for TrueNAS simplifies the installation and operation of Nextcloud. The plugin can be installed with a few clicks on a webUI to create a dataset and initiate the Nextcloud instance. The engineering teams of both companies will collaborate to ensure reliable operation and resolve any integration issues found. Users will have access to both the large Nextcloud and TrueNAS communities for feedback and questions.

The Nextcloud Plugin with TrueNAS Web UI

The Nextcloud plugin is free for up to 100 users and directly available for download within TrueNAS. Small businesses and extended families can set up their own private clouds in just a few clicks. For larger schools and organizations with more than 100 users, an Enterprise support option is available starting at $8/month per user with no limits on the storage capacity or compute power per user. With the use of TrueNAS HA systems, these organizations will be able to build high-reliability solutions. TrueCommand can be used to manage distributed infrastructure deployments

The initial Nextcloud plugin will be based on Nextcloud 22 and TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U6. Collabora will run as a Linux server, VM, or Kubernetes pod. Future versions of the plugin will feature integration with Collabora Online and integration with TrueNAS SCALE for scale-out operation. We look forward to working with both Nextcloud and TrueNAS communities to deliver a first-class Open Source experience.

Later this week, on Wednesday the 13th of October (8am Pacific = 5pm Central European Time), we will host a live Q&A session with Morgan Littlewood, Senior VP at iXsystems, and Jos Poortvliet, Marketing Director and Co-Founder of Nextcloud. It will stream live from the TrueNAS YouTube channel and everyone will be able to ask them anything, so stay tuned!

If you have any additional questions or need advice on a new TrueNAS or Nextcloud project, please contact us. We are standing by to help.

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TrueNAS 12.0-U5 and U5.1 were the most popular releases of TrueNAS ever. Over 65% of the FreeNAS 11.3 installed base has upgraded to TrueNAS CORE.  TrueNAS 12.0 exceeded one exabyte (EB) of data under management in June and is now approaching 2 EB. The FreeNAS.org website has been folded into the TrueNAS.com website to give our community one source for all things TrueNAS/FreeNAS-related.   All FreeNAS versions have officially been moved to “legacy” status.  

While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases.  The history of TrueNAS 12.0 releases has been:

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020, and included many new features and performance enhancements, along with OpenZFS 2.0 support and a major OS update to FreeBSD 12.2, which also broadened hardware compatibility.

TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled features like Fusion pools and efficient scrubbing/resilvering.

TrueNAS 12.0-U2 was released in February and included bug fixes with some minor features. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released April 13, 2021, and included bug fixes with some minor features.  This release was officially ready for mission-critical users.

TrueNAS 12.0-U4 was released June 1, 2021, and included bug fixes with robustness improvements. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released August 3, 2021, and included bug fixes, python upgrades, and security improvements.  This version has been very stable and is considered the best production version, including all previous FreeNAS versions.

TrueNAS users have reported that updates have been smoother than ever with the 12.0 releases.

TrueNAS 12.0-U6 was released on October 5, 2021, and includes a number of fixes, about ten improvements, and a few platform enhancements. These include:

• • NFSv4 HA improvements
  • More extensive SMB regression testing with various SMB options
  • SMB shadow copies feature has been fixed (bug in U5)
  • OpenZFS dedup performance improvements by defaulting to SHA-512 algorithm
  • Better webUI snapshot filtering by name
  • UI improvements for disk temperature monitoring and UEFI booting
  • Ongoing improvements to UI & middleware performance for large drive counts
  • Improved UI for plugin updates/upgrades
  • Various M-Series and R-Series webUI improvements

Please check out the updated TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage the community to keep the suggestions coming!

In addition to improving TrueNAS 12.0 software, we’re also actively partnering with companies that deliver some significant value-add to TrueNAS users. Futurex announced yesterday that they have integrated their KMIP management servers with the KMIP capability in TrueNAS 12.0 Enterprise.  Later this month, there will be a joint announcement with Nextcloud about collaboration between the TrueNAS and Nextcloud platforms.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U6 with a single click to retain roll-back options.  While it is an easy web update, we do recommend waiting to update your system’s zpool feature flags until you have validated your performance and functionality.  New users will want to simply download TrueNAS 12.0-U6 to get started.

TrueNAS Hardware Platforms

TrueNAS 12.0-U6 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High Availability (HA) M-Series. There is also an R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.  All of these can be updated via the web UI and include graphical enclosure management.

For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.

TrueCommand 2.0 is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0 includes support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks.  TrueCommand 2.0  includes a storage navigator to view datasets, files across multiple NAS systems, and real-time per-second statistics. The latest version, TrueCommand 2.0.2, includes the capability to track and report inventory with serial numbers and support status. 

TrueCommand inventory view of TrueNAS systems

TrueNAS 13.0 and SCALE are Progressing

TrueNAS users will have a choice of migrating to SCALE (Linux containers, hyperconvergence, and scale-out) or maintaining their TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise operations.  TrueNAS 12.0-U7 is planned for the January timeframe. The next version of TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise will be 13.0 and will be based on FreeBSD 13.0.  Early development has begun and more information will be available later this year. 

TrueNAS SCALE 21.08-BETA already has over 3,000 users and is getting very positive early reviews. For the next few months, the focus will be on getting TrueNAS SCALE to a release quality similar to TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise 12.0. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 is expected to be a solid, feature-complete Release Candidate (RC) release planned for the end of October.

TrueNAS CORE is the Best-Ever Free NAS

The improvements to TrueNAS further strengthen its position as the best-ever “free NAS” system available. In that way, TrueNAS still is and always will be FreeNAS in spirit.  

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, or visit the newly redesigned truenas.com and download the TrueNAS version that best fits your needs.

Here’s to storage freedom!

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It’s now time to thank the FreeNAS shark for its service. FreeNAS 11.3-U5 played its part by being a very stable and reliable release. TrueNAS 12.0 is now much faster, more secure, and more reliable than any previous FreeNAS release.

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released today and is now the recommended update for even the most conservative users of both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. Wait a couple of weeks for community feedback and then update.  It will ship by default on all new TrueNAS systems.

In October of last year, the first release of TrueNAS 12.0 marked the official merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image, accompanied by a long list of features and performance improvements.  Since then, over 70% of the FreeNAS 11.3 installed base have already migrated to TrueNAS CORE.  TrueNAS 12.0 passed one exabyte (EB) of data under management over two months ago; this number is now about 1.5 EB.

FreeNAS Transition to “Legacy” status as TrueNAS 12.0-U5 isReleased

In the near future, the FreeNAS.org website will be redirected to the newer-styled TrueNAS.com website.  There will be very little change for most users, but Google searches will be redirected to current TrueNAS software and not the legacy software information.  (We will maintain a page on truenas.com for legacy FreeNAS software downloads).

While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases.  The history of TrueNAS 12.0 releases has been:

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020, and included many new features along with OpenZFS 2.0 support.

TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled features like Fusion pools, efficient scrubbing/resilvering.

TrueNAS 12.0-U2 was released in February, and included bug fixes and minor features. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released April 13, 2021, and included bug fixes and some minor features.  This release was recommended for mission-critical users.

TrueNAS 12.0-U4 was released June 1, 2021, and included bug fixes and robustness improvements. 

TrueNAS users have been reporting that updates have been smooth.

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released on August 3, 2021.  A full list of changes and bugs is available for those with an account on the TrueNAS Jira bug tracker. Issues resolved include:

• About twenty improvements and eighty bug fixes. 
• Python upgrades to address potential memory leaks and eliminate rare middleware crashes. 
• OpenZFS update to 2.0.5.
• Several security updates to key components that are not available in 11.3.
• TrueNAS R-Series and Mini Enclosure management has been improved.
• Several WebUI improvements – including resolving a dashboard CPU% bug.
• NVMe drives automatic resizing support.
• M-Series HA improvements.

Please check out the updated TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage more user suggestions going forward.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS/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.  All of these can be updated via the web UI and include graphical enclosure management.R-Series enclosure management showing a drive and its associated vdev

For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U5 with a single click to retain roll-back options.  While it is an easy web update, we do recommend waiting to update your system’s zpool feature flags until you are finished validating your performance and functionality.  

For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.

For new users, download TrueNAS 12.0-U5 to get started.

TrueCommand 2.0 is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0 includes support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks.  TrueCommand 2.0  includes a storage navigator to view datasets, files across multiple NAS systems, and real-time per-second statistics.

TrueCommand view of TrueNAS systems with per second updates

TrueNAS 13.0 and SCALE are Progressing

TrueNAS users will have a choice of migrating to SCALE (Linux containers, hyperconvergence, and scale-out) or maintaining their TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise operations.  TrueNAS 12.0-U6 is planned for the November timeframe. The next version of TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise will be 13.0 and will be based on FreeBSD 13.0.  Early development has begun and more information will be available later this year. 

TrueNAS SCALE 21.06-BETA already has thousands of users and is getting very positive early reviews. For the next five months, the focus will be on getting TrueNAS SCALE to a release quality similar to TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise 12.0. TrueNAS SCALE 21.08 is expected to be a solid, largely feature-complete BETA release.  A Release Candidate is planned for early Q4. 

TrueNAS CORE is the Best-Ever Free NAS

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 improvements continue its tradition as the best-ever “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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This is why simple, cost-effective capacity and performance scalability were made primary design principles behind the TrueNAS M-Series enterprise storage systems.  And, with some significant hardware and software improvements released in 2021, the third generation TrueNAS M-Series now makes keeping pace with data growth even simpler while also enabling unprecedented scalability from 20 TB to 20 PB and beyond…all the way to 2 Exabytes! 

M-Series Hardware Scales Up from 20 TB to 20 PB

The original TrueNAS M-Series was released in 2018 and has since delivered rock solid service to thousands of TrueNAS customers. There are three major M-Series models: M40, M50, and M60. Each model has single and dual storage controller options and multiple network options including 100/25Gbe and Fibre Channel.

The TrueNAS M60 is the latest model that began shipping in late 2020. The updated midplane in the M60 chassis supports a 16GByte/s interconnect between controllers as well as 16GByte/s of PCIe bandwidth to four dual-ported NVME SSDs. The combination of M60 controllers, NVDIMMs, and midplane bandwidth enabled over 20GByte/s of storage bandwidth and one million IOPS.

The third generation M-Series models, introduced in March 2021, now all use the very same M60 Chassis. The M60 chassis was introduced at no extra cost to TrueNAS customers and ensures that all M-Series models can be non-disruptively upgraded for additional capacity and bandwidth should their current model approach its performance or space limits. Simply replace one controller at a time while the system remains in service. All data remains available, and all configuration and IP addressing remains unchanged. 

Let’s examine these expansion and upgrade capabilities more closely using an M40 as an example.

A new M40 customer can now start with a small number of HDDs or SSDs, even as little as 20TB. If capacity growth is needed, Expansion Shelves (24, 60, or 102 Bays) can be added to grow capacity. The M40 has the CPU/RAM/HBA resources to support two shelves. 

To grow capacity or performance further, the M40 controllers can be upgraded to M50 (4/8 shelves) or M60 (12 shelves) controllers. Additional shelves can then be added to grow the capacity to over 20 PB in a single rack. This can all be done as in-service upgrades with applications seeing only non-disruptive pauses, as if a software update was being done.

This 2021 M-Series hardware change allows the M-Series to address requirements from 20TB to 20PB with in-service upgrades. That’s a factor of 1,000x capacity increase.

TrueNAS M-Series can SCALE “out” from 20 PB to 2 Exabyte

A single TrueNAS Enterprise M60 can support over 20 PB of data. This is more than enough for many projects, or even for entire organizations, but there are many applications that need even more than this. Video archives, scientific data, and enterprise backup applications often require hundreds of petabytes with some organizations even requiring an exabyte or beyond.

These massive storage requirements typically need the scale-out architecture that is enabled by TrueNAS SCALE. TrueNAS SCALE provides scale-out capabilities for both file storage (SMB or gluster) and object storage (S3 API). With TrueNAS SCALE 21.08, these capabilities are currently available for BETA testing and will progress to RELEASE in the coming months. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02-RC (available in October) is expected to include single-controller BETA support for the M-Series, with full Enterprise support available next. All of the standard OpenZFS and management capabilities of TrueNAS Enterprise are still provided.

A storage customer can start with a TrueNAS Enterprise M-Series platform, such as an M60 with up to 20 PB. This M-Series platform may grow to occupy a whole rack with its expansion shelves. After a software “sidegrade” to TrueNAS SCALE, data is maintained and then additional nodes/racks can be added to potentially scale-out an S3 cluster to 100 nodes, or nearly 2 Exabytes of capacity.

The Benefits of M-Series SCALE-ability

The combination of third generation M-Series hardware “scale-up” and the TrueNAS SCALE “scale-out” software enables systems to grow from 20 TB to 20 PB and all the way to 2 EB.

Not everyone needs this massive scalability from 20 TB to 2 EB. However, many storage customers need the ability to grow more than 10X over the lifetime of their investment. The TrueNAS M-Series is designed to adapt to changing requirements by allowing scalability while protecting investments and minimizing any downtime. 

The M-Series scalability is also remarkable in that it is built with Open Source technology and economics. Industry-standard hardware components, along with Open Source TrueNAS software, enable the continued growth of data while keeping the cost of storage affordable. Our goal is to enable data growth while staying within allocated budgets. 

Thank You to Our Customers and Community

We would like to thank all of our TrueNAS M-Series customers for helping us refine the M-Series platform and ensure that we have a solid operational model. Your feedback has been invaluable, and we are committed to your continued support. And, if you have M-Series or other systems from before 2021, please contact us if you need to address your own scalability needs. There are several options available to you.

The TrueNAS community has also been outstanding in its support of the TrueNAS SCALE project. We are excited to complete the ALPHA and BETA phases and start supporting production deployments. Thank you for the feedback, bug tickets, and enthusiastic support. We hope the energy put into SCALE helps you and your organizations in the future. 

If you have any additional questions or need advice on a new project, please contact us. We are standing by to help.

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• TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020, and included many new features along with OpenZFS 2.0 support.
• TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled a few new features like Fusion pools and more efficient scrubbing and resilvering.
• TrueNAS 12.0-U2 was released in February, and included many bug fixes and some minor features. A minor update to 12.0-U2.1 was provided to reduce some alerts seen by users.
• TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was officially released April 13, 2021, and includes many bug fixes and some minor features. A full list of changes and bugs is available for those with an account on the TrueNAS Jira bug tracker.

Issues resolved in TrueNAS 12.0-U3:
Four new features, seven improvements, and about 140 bug fixes are included. Many of these are minor reporting or web UI issues. For the M-Series, we’ve added the ability to remotely upgrade and downgrade NVDIMM firmware. For all platforms, there are improvements to ZFS ARC and network interface statistics.
TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is Now More Extensive Than 11.3
TrueNAS 12.0 has moved to a more modern documentation style that encourages and simplifies user and community contribution. The new modular TrueNAS documentation is now more comprehensive than FreeNAS was. We’ve completed an initiative to simplify navigation and improve usability. Please check out the new TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage more user suggestions going forward. See below for an example of the new docs site and menu system.

TrueNAS Quality Lifecycle
While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases. The table below summarizes our current process and the dates for TrueNAS 12.0. We always recommend that mission critical use cases should also wait for a version to be widely deployed before deploying it themselves. TrueNAS 12.0-U2.1 was very good and with 12.0-U3, we expect to meet our quality goals.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy
TrueNAS 12.0-U3 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS/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. All of these can be updated via the web UI.
For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U2 with a single click to retain roll-back options. Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0-U3 to get started.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.
TrueCommand 2.0 is coming
TrueNAS 12.0 also includes support for TrueCommand and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks. TrueCommand Cloud is generally available and is based on TrueCommand 1.3.2. 
TrueCommand 2.0 will add new functionality to TrueNAS 12.0 deployments. More information will be available later this month. TrueCommand 2.0 trials have been going well and include a storage navigator for browsing and snapshotting files, directories, and datasets. Please contact iXsystems if you are a TrueCommand user and interested in early access to TrueCommand 2.0.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the best Free NAS
TrueNAS 12.0-U3 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.

The post TrueNAS 12.0 Reaches Prime Time appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020 and included many new features along with OpenZFS 2.0 support.
• TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled a few new features like Fusion pools and better scrubbing and resilvering.
• TrueNAS 12.0-U1.1 was released in January to hotfix a serious OpenZFS bug that was causing data/read cache corruption while acting as storage for Virtualization workloads…
• TrueNAS 12.0-U2 has been released and includes many bug fixes and some minor features. A full list of changes and bugs* is available. (*Note: Please register and log in to view the full list)

Major Bugs resolved in 12.0-U2 include:

• Networking Performance: A performance bug has been found in Chelsio and Intel drivers for FreeBSD 12.2.
• OpenZFS ACoW Corruption: While fixed in Hot-Patch U1.1, users still running 12.0 or 12.0-U1 are encouraged to update right away to avoid any potential issues on workloads using another filesystem on top of ZFS (Typically Virtualization Specific).
• SMTP Oauth: Resolves an issue with setting up email alerts while using Gmail’s Oauth functionality.

Coming Soon!

• SCALE Migration: A path to migrate from TrueNAS CORE to TrueNAS SCALE will be documented and made available for testing in the near future. This migration path is for convenience for SCALE enthusiasts who want to experiment with Linux containers and is not recommended for TrueNAS CORE users happy with their deployments.

TrueNAS Quality Lifecycle
While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases. The table below summarizes our current processes and the dates for TrueNAS 12.0. We always recommend that mission critical use cases should also wait for a version to be widely deployed before deploying it themselves.

TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation has reached content parity with 11.3
TrueNAS 12.0 has moved to a more modern documentation style that encourages contribution. The new and modular documentation is now as comprehensive as that of FreeNAS 11.3. We’ve now started an initiative to simplify navigation and improve usability. 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 to TrueNAS SCALE
One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is that it paved the way for TrueNAS SCALE. While TrueNAS SCALE 20.12 “Angelfish” is based on 90% of the same software, SCALE is still in ALPHA state. For most users, we recommend moving to TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0. From there, users can either stay with the CORE edition or migrate to SCALE for Linux services and scale-out functionality. We call this flexibility “Storage Freedom”. Post TrueNAS 12.0-U2, we will enable a migration path to TrueNAS SCALE for those that want to test Kubernetes or scale-out before it is fully GA. 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 to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U2 with a single click to retain roll-back options. Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0-U2 to get started.
TrueNAS 12.0-U2 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.
TrueCommand Cloud
TrueNAS 12.0 also includes support for TrueCommand and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks. TrueCommand Cloud is generally available and based on TrueCommand 1.3.2. TrueCommand 2.0 will begin to trial this month and includes a storage navigator for browsing files, directories, and datasets.
TrueNAS CORE: Still the best Free NAS
TrueNAS 12.0-U2 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.

The post TrueNAS 12.0-U2 is Released 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.

The post OpenZFS 2.0 Ships First on TrueNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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.

The post TrueNAS 12.0-U1 is Scheduled for early December appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

With the merger of the software, we are also making progress toward a new and improved TrueNAS.com website, which is the future home of all things TrueNAS-related. The chart below describes the transition.

And, here is the long list of features and performance improvements.

Prior to this RELEASE version, almost 7,000 users were involved in putting TrueNAS 12.0 software through its paces. During the pre-RELEASE process, TrueNAS 12.0 demonstrated over 1.2 Million IOPS and over 23GB/s on a TrueNAS M60. TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 provided the stability needed to move many enthusiasts into production. Many thanks for the positive feedback and the bug reports, which were mostly minor or hardware-specific.

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE is expected to be very solid and perform significantly better than the 11.3 versions. It is also the first production RELEASE of the OpenZFS 2.0 base. Snapshot your pool, backup your data, and try it out! You can download it here. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this unification process and Community feedback.

An updated summary of the TrueNAS 12.0 features is below (with capabilities specific to TrueNAS Enterprise identified by the light blue text). As promised, no features were removed from FreeNAS 11.3, but many features have been added.

TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is Improving

TrueNAS 12.0 has moved to a more modern documentation style that encourages contribution. The new documentation is more modular and expandable, but is not yet as complete and comprehensive as that of FreeNAS 11.3. Feel free to use both user guides while we complete the transition. Please check out the 12.0 documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re grateful for all the contributions received thus far!

Storage Freedom with TrueNAS SCALE

One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is TrueNAS SCALE. Last week we passed a milestone with the first version, TrueNAS SCALE 20.10 “Angelfish”. While it 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”.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

We hope these TrueNAS 12.0 performance improvements have a positive impact on your FreeNAS systems. 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 email us.

TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 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. A press release was also released yesterday on the TrueNAS R-Series and the first TrueNAS SCALE release.
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.

The post TrueNAS 12.0 is Released! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS has long supported disaster recovery (DR) scenarios. This blog attempts to address the various types of supported DR scenarios and their related workflows.
Point-in-Time Recovery – ZFS Replication
Of the native ways to replicate data, ZFS replication is the most efficient and reliable method for asynchronously replicating data from one TrueNAS system to another. Replication is based on snapshots of datasets or zvols and synchronizes the snapshots of the first system to the second system. There are numerous advantages to using ZFS replication. One of those is that a snapshot is a point-in-time, read-only copy of the data. This ensures that the contents of the snapshot cannot be altered.

Replicate in a single direction for DR

Replicate bi-directionally for dual-site DR

ZFS replication is commonly used for disaster recovery. Should the first system or site go down, the remote system can be brought back by cloning the snapshot to a new dataset and restoring the share. This recovery does require some work on the side of the admin, but it’s incredibly quick and ensures that whatever was transferred is retained. Snapshots and replications can be scheduled to run every few minutes.

Another benefit of ZFS replication is the capability for the snapshots and referenced data to be stored on systems and pools of different specs or pool configuration. All-flash, high-performance pools can be backed up to lower performance pools with traditional drives and different RAID configurations. Smaller systems can also be backed up to larger central repositories. Companies such as FirstLink and others use this to help clone edge devices like the TrueNAS Mini systems to a central core TrueNAS in their data center. ZFS replication on TrueNAS ensures data protection regardless of system complexity, size, or location.
File-based Recovery – Rsync
Rsync is a file-level migration that’s the same as rsync in the Linux/FreeBSD command line. It’s handy for semi-live sync of data if you need just the same files between sites each shared over a local share.

Rsync is useful for file transfer, but it’s not recommended if files are being modified. For example, if an rsync task starts while 100 GB is being written and the data is changed before the file is written, it will cause issues with versioning and data integrity. Rsync should never be used to copy active VM data stores, block-level data (iSCSI or fibre channel shares), or other data that could constantly be in use. Rsync is slower than ZFS replication, particularly for large datasets, so it’s recommended for convenience over data integrity. It can be used between TrueNAS and many other systems.
More information about setting rsync tasks in TrueNAS is located here.
File Recovery To or From the Cloud – Cloud Sync
TrueNAS can copy, pull, and sync data to a variety of cloud-based data storage systems, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Google Drive, Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Box, and more. By integrating rclone sync for file transfers, this feature can copy files on TrueNAS into a cloud repository of a user’s choosing.

For larger datasets, TrueNAS systems are more cost-effective long-term than cloud offerings, including Amazon AWS. For this reason, using TrueNAS as a backup target for protecting cloud-based data, e.g., from AWS, Dropbox, or Google Drive, is ideal because data stored in TrueNAS will get scrubbed, checked, and retained with an unlimited number of snapshots available.

Automatic Site-to-Site failover – DNS, Load-Balancing, Proprietary Tools
Automatic failover between sites is beyond the scope of TrueNAS systems alone. TrueNAS is a storage system, and while it handles data replication well in a variety of ways, automatic failover to a remote site requires knowledge of the services themselves. For environments with web or video streaming services, DNS round-robin with failover might be feasible. Several web servers, like NGINX, also feature load-balancing services which could help mitigate service overload or downtime. TrueNAS systems provide a stable backend in this topology, with the option of also running ZFS replication for additional safety. Contact iXsystems if you need assistance with designing a storage system for your business.

TrueNAS is a storage platform with powerful ways to ensure data integrity and consistency between local and remote sites. ZFS replication is the fastest and best way to ensure the data transferred is intact. Rsync is useful for file sync but cannot be used for live data or block-level data that could change during transfer. Cloud sync supports user workloads that archive to or from mainstream cloud providers. Beyond these tools, TrueNAS works with other systems, such as Asigra Backup and iconik smart media management, to provide an ultra-scalable backend with robust performance and a strong emphasis on data protection. The tools that TrueNAS provides combined with the flexibility to work with nearly any IT environment make it a robust system for cross-site and DR workloads.

The post Cross-Site Disaster Recovery with TrueNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 improvements include:

NUMA Improvements: With multiple CPUs in a system, there is a need to manage Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA). TrueNAS 12.0 does a better job of assigning cores and memory, providing performance improvements for the M50 and other dual socket architectures.
ZFS Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file systems metadata and dedupe tables. This is one of the core features of OpenZFS 2.0.
ZFS Fusion Pools: The special SSD vdevs 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 by configuring a higher I/O size.
ZFS Persistent L2ARC: L2ARC (flash-based read cache) is typically cleared on a controller reboot or failover. For smaller systems with less than a TB of L2ARC, that can be ok. For larger systems with 10TB of L2ARC, it may take hours or even days to rehydrate the L2ARC. The persistent L2ARC option avoids clearing the cache allowing performance sensitive systems to get back to full speed without delay.
ZFS async DMU and CoW: Within 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 OK for some workloads. This will increase the bandwidth of many RAIDZ1/2/3 VDEVs.
ZFS Checksum Vectorization: ZFS protects data by writing a Checksum into metadata for each block of data written to disk. These checksums are then used for scrubbing the data and verifying every READ. The calculation of these checksums can be compute intensive. Vectorization uses the accelerated instructions found in many Intel processors to reduce compute overhead and free up valuable compute cycles for other tasks.
ZFS Asynchronous TRIM: OpenZFS 2.0 includes asynchronous automatic and manual trim capabilities. Manual Trims can be scheduled overnight or each weekend to provide more performance during business hours.
Faster ZFS Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times by over 50% for larger systems.
ZFS Dedupe: ZFS deduplication performs well if all the dedupe metadata is in DRAM, but is painfully slow if the dedupe metadata ends up on HDDs. With the addition of Fusion Pools, the dedupe metadata can be assigned to the flash VDEVs and performance is improved. There is some ongoing testing to see how much faster it will be, but we expect significant progress.
In addition to the ZFS improvements, there have been some dramatic improvements in the performance of some key services:
iSCSI Reads: iXsystems has enhanced the iSCSI target software so that a memory copy between the Ethernet NIC and ZFS is removed. This improves the high end performance limits and allows greater than 1 Million IOPS and over 15GB/s to be achieved with the right hardware.
SMB Single Client Speed: The speed of a single SMB client is important for many applications including multimedia editing where the upload and download speeds for 4K and 8K video files is important. These speeds have been increased by >20% to over 2 Gigabytes per second.
SMB Multi-Client Capacity: The number of SMB clients that can be supported is important to large organizations. The number of SMB clients that can be supported on a high-end system has been increased by more than 50%.
NFS Single Client: The NFS target has been improved to reduce latency and increase the bandwidth of a single NFS client from less than 2GB/s to over 3GB/s.
On the TrueNAS Enterprise side with the M-Series platforms, we have been testing for a high-performance system and have added support for:
Multiple NVDIMMs: Each NVDIMM can be assigned as a Write SLOG for different pools. A single system can have an All-flash pool and a Fusion or Hybrid Pool with HDDs.
20GB/s PCIe Interconnect: For High Availability (HA) systems with dual controllers, we use a high-speed PCIe interconnect to provide low latency synchronization of WRITES. This high bandwidth interconnect reduces latency and increases WRITE bandwidth by 100%.
All of these performance improvements, plus advances in processor performance, contribute to the ability to build and support larger systems well beyond 10PB in size.

Progress toward TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 12.0 is going through the same NIGHTLY, BETA1, BETA2, RC1, RELEASE, and UPDATE stages that FreeNAS has gone through. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this unification process and Community feedback.
We appreciated the Community testing of the TrueNAS 12.0 BETA1 release. TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2 has also been tested on Enterprise HA systems within our labs. Please update to BETA2 and provide your feedback. Let us know whether you see the expected performance improvements. Bugs that are caught and reported early are going to have less impact on the final schedule.
TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is Maturing
The new TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today.
TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS
We hope these TrueNAS 12.0 performance improvements have a positive impact on your systems. 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, email us.
For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 BETA with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2 and get started.

The post TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2 Showcases Performance Improvements appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• • The first-boot phase of a TrueNAS CORE installation is the simplest OS installation we’ve ever seen.
    

• • Assuming you have all those things, the [Active Directory] domain join process in TrueNAS Core works lightning fast; it’s enormously faster than joining an actual Windows PC to the domain.
    

• • Creating a new share mapped to our dataset exposes some of TrueNAS’s best “easy mode” functionality—Windows ACLs (Access Control Lists) work right out of the box, meaning that adjusting file and folder permissions from File Explorer on Windows Clients will just work. Trying to get this right on a Linux system is just plain painful, so this is an important feature and a positive differentiator for TrueNAS and other systems which offer it.
    

• • FreeNAS, and now TrueNAS CORE, have come a long way in the past several years. TrueNAS CORE is an easy way for a home admin or hobbyist who’s a little nervous about the command line to maintain a truly robust, feature-rich ZFS storage server. It’s also good for potential TrueNAS Enterprise customers to get their feet wet with a free edition that looks just like what they’ll be working with if they pull the trigger on a commercial license.

TrueNAS CORE is still BETA

While the general quality of TrueNAS 12.0 BETA relative to 11.3 is still good, it is still BETA. Jim identified two bugs (NAS-106638, NAS-106665 – both have been resolved in the NIGHTLY images) and suggested several places where we could improve the web UI. We’ll be incorporating that feedback. He also highlighted that we added the new ZFS pool feature flag called log_spacemap.
There were some ACL challenges identified: “it’s not entirely clear which parts of the dialog apply to the global Unix permissions and which side apply to the inside of the actual ACLs—the two are entirely separate in reality but are jumbled together in a single dialog here.” On review, this happened because the dataset was set up as “generic” type which is Unix-style and not “SMB”. To avoid the issue, make sure datasets are created as “SMB”.
Pointing out the log_spacemap addition is very useful to the community. TrueNAS uses this feature to ensure performance is relatively stable as a ZFS pool fills up. The log_spacemap makes it easier for ZFS to find free disk space for new writes in a full and fragmented pool. As with any new ZFS feature, enabling this feature flag does not cause any replication issues, but may restrict the ability to import the pool on an older ZFS environment. The feature is optionally enabled on upgrade to 12.0 and should only be enabled once you’ve determined you will not be rolling back to a previous version of ZFS.
Some slight performance issues were identified which could be improved. Again, being BETA, we plan to address performance more systematically in the next version of TrueNAS 12.0 (BETA2) with some significant SMB and ZFS improvements.

Progress toward TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 12.0 is still on schedule. The TrueNAS 12.0 BETA1 stage has had relatively few and minor issues and almost 10X more testing than 11.3 BETA. However, there are some significant ZFS and SMB performance changes being made that deserve another test cycle and so the next version will be called TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2 and will be available in mid-August.
The TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums is the best place for Community information and feedback.
The new TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today.
TrueNAS CORE, formerly “FreeNAS”, will still be the Best Free NAS. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us.
For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 BETA with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 BETA and get started. Onward to BETA2!

The post TrueNAS CORE makes ZFS Easy appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

We are excited to announce that TrueNAS 12.0 BETA has hit both the target date and our quality goals. The BETA release has completed two full cycles of QA (the same as FreeNAS 11.3 RC1) and testing from almost 1,000 users. There are no high priority issues and we can now recommend that the Community can upgrade their FreeNAS 11.3 systems and start their TrueNAS 12.0 testing. Snapshot your pool, backup your data, and try it out. You can also download the TrueNAS 12.0 BETA if you’d prefer.

Along the way, we have refined the logos for TrueNAS. These logos are now in use for TrueNAS 12.0. There is also the option to use the classic FreeNAS icon in the web user interface.

TrueNAS 12.0 BETA is the 1st major deliverable of the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Unification process. This process has already brought several of the major expected benefits to life:

• Rapid Development: Unified images have accelerated software development.
• Improved Quality: Reduced development redundancy and unified QA has increased software quality.
• Earlier Hardware Enablement: TrueNAS 12.0 brings improved support for AMD EPYC / Ryzen platforms and enhanced NUMA support for more efficient CPU core handling. Tell us your stories!
• Simplified Documentation: The 1st release of the unified TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is now available and includes the capability for user contributions.
• Reduced Redundancy: We are now starting to produce unified web content and videos which refer to one software family without the need for duplication.
• Flexibility: Unified images enable simpler transitions or upgrades between editions.
• Resource efficiency: Software developers are freed to work on new features and related projects like TrueNAS SCALE.
• OpenZFS 2.0: The major investment in the development and integration of “OpenZFS 2.0” is paying off with advances like dataset encryption, major performance improvements, and compatibility with Linux ZFS pools which was needed for TrueNAS SCALE.

TrueNAS 12.0 Features

The master feature list for TrueNAS 12.0 is below. The features in black existed in FreeNAS 11.3 and are shared by both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. The features in blue have been added to TrueNAS 12.0. The column to the right displays features that are available in TrueNAS Enterprise only. TrueNAS 12.0 CORE has a superset of FreeNAS 11.3 features.

The feature additions for TrueNAS 12.0 have been summarized as:

• Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file systems metadata and dedupe tables. This is one of the core features of OpenZFS 2.0.
• Fusion Pools: The special SSD vdevs 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.
• SSD Wear Monitoring: Any SSD (Boot, L2ARC, slog or vdev) can be monitored for wear and alerts created.
• 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 ZFS 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 ZFS Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times.
• ZFS Linux Compatibility: Linux and FreeBSD are peer operating systems for OpenZFS 2.0. Compressed, deduplicated, and encrypted data can be efficiently replicated from a Linux host to a TrueNAS system for backup and archive. It is also possible to import a pool (drive set) from Linux to TrueNAS. This is being used to start the TrueNAS SCALE project which supports scale-out storage and hyperconvergence.
• Accelerated ZFS: Several performance improvements have been made to reduce both drive IOPS and the CPU cycles required.
• User Quota Support: Allows setting per-user storage quotas which are enforced by ZFS for both NFS and SMB shares. Users can be local or AD/LDAP.
• OpenVPN Client and Server: VPNs provide security for remotely accessing storage services, such as SMB or NFS, across the Internet. This feature enables the OpenVPN Client or Server to be included in the NAS for simpler administration and lower costs. The other end of the VPN connection can be any OpenVPN client, such as another NAS, Firewall Device, or Personal Desktop/Laptop.
• Two Factor Authentication: This ensures that a compromised root password cannot be used by itself to gain access to the administrator interface.
• API Keys: Access to the REST / WebSockets API can now be done via API keys which can be created and revoked directly via the WebUI for additional security.
• KMIP Support: Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) is an Enterprise feature for securing drives or datasets through a centralized key management system.
• TrueCommand Dataset Management: TrueCommand and TrueNAS are joined at the hip and will provide dataset monitoring in TrueCommand 1.3 (to be released in July).

Progress toward TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 12.0 is scheduled to go through the same NIGHTLY, BETA, RC1, RELEASE, and UPDATE states that FreeNAS has gone through. There will be no changes to the software update process or the information available. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this unification process and Community feedback. Over 700 users have been testing the NIGHTLY release with some great feedback.
We appreciate the Community testing of the TrueNAS 12.0 BETA release. Bugs that are caught and reported early are going to have less impact on the final schedule. TrueNAS 12.0 BETA will also be tested on Enterprise HA systems within our labs

.
New and Improved Documentation
The new TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. Below is a snapshot of the documentation site and its new user-friendly organization.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

But, don’t take it from us. StorageReview explained how many of the TrueNAS 12.0 features are integrated into the user interface. Ars Technica also reviewed TrueNAS 12.0 and the OpenZFS 2.0 improvements.
TrueNAS CORE 12.0 has the new logos included but will have the option to use a throwback FreeNAS theme. Below is the new TrueNAS theme.

TrueNAS CORE pictured with the new TrueNAS logo

We hope you are sharing our excitement for TrueNAS 12.0. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the forums, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us.
For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 BETA with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 BETA and get started.

The post Be One of the First to Test Drive TrueNAS 12.0 BETA appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

There was a time in history where all that mattered was an Operating System (OS) and the hardware it ran on — the “pre-software era”, if you will. Your hardware dictated the OS you used.
Once software applications became prominent, your hardware’s OS determined the applications you could run. Application vendors were forced to juggle the burden of “portability” between OS platforms, choosing carefully the operating systems they’d develop their software to. Then, there were the great OS Wars of the 1990s, replete with the rampant competition, licensing battles, and nasty lawsuits, which more or less gave birth to the “open source OS” era.
The advent of the hypervisor simultaneously gave way to the “virtual era” which set us on a path of agnosticism toward the OS. Instead of choosing from the applications available for your chosen OS, you could simply install another OS on the same hardware for your chosen application. The OS became nothing but a necessary cog in the stack.
TrueNAS open storage enables this “post-OS era” with support for storage clients of all UNIX flavors, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, VMware, Citrix, and many others. Containerization has carried that mentality even further. An operating system, like the hardware that runs it, is now just thought of as part of the “infrastructure”.
So, which OS should TrueNAS use? There have been some comments in the press about our plans, so we thought it best to share a fuller picture.

Most are aware by now that we have decided to unify FreeNAS & TrueNAS into a single software image and brand: TrueNAS Open Storage. With the release of Version 12.0, what was previously called FreeNAS will now be TrueNAS CORE. What was formerly TrueNAS will now be TrueNAS Enterprise. Both of these TrueNAS editions use FreeBSD 12.0 as the base OS and it has been performing very well. Future development for these editions will continue on FreeBSD.

We also announced the start of a new Open Source project, called TrueNAS SCALE. The goals of this project include running Linux containers and building scale-out clustered storage. Because of these project goals, we chose Linux (Debian) as the base OS so that we had access to all of these container and clustering tools and could deliver a well-integrated user experience in a reasonable timeframe.
So, TrueNAS is now officially multi-OS. As ComputerWorld once said, “Welcome to the post-OS Era”.

Why Multi-OS?

The history of TrueNAS is FreeNAS and FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a well-structured OS with our preferred BSD license. It integrates well with ZFS and is well suited to the Open Storage business model that TrueNAS uses. The modularity, stability, and simplicity of FreeBSD are well known. This translates into simpler and easier to use software, particularly for a storage platform. Who doesn’t love that?

However, the marketplace winner for new applications is the Linux OS and Containers. Even Microsoft is embracing this reality. Whether you prefer Docker, LXC, or Kubernetes, the primary application platform for the next decade is containers and scale-out infrastructure. If application platforms will be simpler and cheaper by integrating Linux containers with ZFS storage, then who would not want that option?
The iXsystems Engineering Team looked at the choices and decided that being multi-OS was the right solution. It was better than picking one OS for all products and having to make major tradeoffs with respect to stability, continuity, market reach, and innovation. We also wanted to be more inclusive, broadening our community by inviting users and developers that are familiar with Linux. Therefore, being “multi-OS” gives our users and developers the best of both worlds:

1. Stability and reliability of our current TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise products by continuing to deliver them on FreeBSD.
2. Faster access to the foundational technologies required to make TrueNAS SCALE (containers, scale-out) into a best-in-class hyperconverged infrastructure.

The critical element of the system common to all TrueNAS editions is ZFS which has to secure, store, and manage data over many years and even decades. We also needed to invest in enabling TrueNAS as a multi-OS capable platform.

How did we enable Multi-OS?

Starting with the FreeNAS 11.1 code base from a couple of years ago, we have invested in the multi-OS transition with a few key initiatives:

• Middleware was updated to be OS independent and have clean REST and Web sockets APIs.
• Web user interface was modernized using Angular and the new APIs. It is also OS independent.
• Collaboration with Open Source component projects like Samba and rclone to ensure we would have portability of key components.
• Minimize use and exposure of Linux’s systemd and FreeBSD’s rc.d.
• OpenZFS 2.0 integration of FreeBSD and Linux so that data and pools could be migrated easily between OSes.
• QA/testing infrastructure built so that we could test all editions with the same tests.

What developers will find is that apart from the OS, over 90% of TrueNAS software is shared between the CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions. More importantly for users, improvements to one edition will generally be shared and available for the other editions.

What is the impact on TrueNAS users?

For users, nothing… except for more rapid development of new features and solutions. There will be more choices in the future, but we assume there are no objections to that!
For Linux developers, there will be new opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project. We aim to make it a very well coordinated and managed environment to develop the best Open Hyperconverged Infrastructure. We’ll be calling for contributors soon.
If you have any additional questions or need advice on a new project, please email us at info@iXsystems.com. We are standing by to help.

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Thank you for removing ‘Free’ from the name

Specifically, there were a number of comments from community members thanking us for removing “Free” from the name, because it removed a stigma held by their peers, colleagues, or bosses that a product with “Free” in the name couldn’t also be of high quality or fit for business use. “I can finally look my boss in the eye when he asks what storage we are using in the lab” is a paraphrase of one such comment. Of course, comments like this were a little tough to hear about a name we held so dearly for so long, but it was awesome feedback to receive because it reinforced one of the major reasons we decided to unify the brands as TrueNAS in the first place.
If you’re reading this, you likely already know that FreeNAS is far more than just a free NAS. You likely already know that it is powerful, enterprise software defined storage. Since many of us use it in homelabs, you know that it automatically gets lumped in with low-end NAS systems and you might take offense when it gets compared to Synology or QNAP systems instead of Netapp or EMC. You know these things already, but it’s clear that not everybody does…yet. And, if you think back, it probably took you a while to get there, and the name “FreeNAS” likely didn’t help the cause. And, if we’re totally honest with ourselves, the shark didn’t make things any easier.
We want all users, old and new, to have full confidence in deploying TrueNAS CORE. It’s important to us that you can look your boss in the eye when he asks what storage you’re using in the lab. And, when you prove how successful that’s been, we want you to have that same confidence when you recommend TrueNAS Enterprise once it’s time to replace those overpriced Netapp or EMC arrays. And, we want to make sure everything we do down to our logo helps you make that case.

We’ve Gone Full Corporate

We say that in jest, of course. iXsystems was founded on the principles of “being different”. We embraced open source long before it was ever cool or mainstream. We develop in the open. We try to be as transparent as we can in all we do. We built an enterprise storage product and made it free when everyone else thought we were crazy, and now FreeNAS is the world’s most popular storage software. We have fought hard to keep this identity of being different from the rest of the industry.
Of course, behind that philosophy also exists a very serious company focused on building innovating, high-quality products, world class customer support, and outstanding customer experience. We understand that our desire to be different can’t ever get in the way of you getting your job done, and this extends to the impression our brand makes.

The Abstract Shark Fin?

So, we solicited the help of an outside design agency and started looking at other logomark designs entirely but ultimately came back to playing around with the shark fin: refining it, tweaking it, making it abstract. After all, we couldn’t lose that soul of the product entirely, right? So, during that part of the process, we ended up creating two sharks that were vertical mirror images of one another that once put together sort of formed a cool looking box (some said “shark tank” or “aquarium”). After initially chuckling at the similarity to the box references in the show “Silicon Valley”, we thought, “Ok, this does look pretty cool….box….storage, container…what if the box was open to represent the concept of “open storage”? That looks cool! What if we stacked the boxes for the TrueNAS Enterprise logo to represent the extra protection that comes with high-availability? And, what if we put four boxes side by side to represent TrueNAS SCALE? Wait…..what’s TrueNAS SCALE you ask? Oh, just a little thing we’re working on in the background 🙂 More to come on that soon!
Ok, ok, enough blabbing. Without further ado, we’re proud to unveil the monochrome version of the new TrueNAS CORE, TrueNAS Enterprise, and TrueNAS SCALE logos, we’ve lovingly dubbed “the shark tanks” or “shark boxes”.

Color is in the works, but we couldn’t wait any longer to show you since it’s going to start appearing in TrueNAS 12 nightlies as soon as this week!
We’re excited with what’s coming in TrueNAS 12, not least of which is this sharp new logo, that will hopefully send you marching into your boss’s office first thing tomorrow morning, look her dead in the eye and say, “we’re replacing all of our storage with TrueNAS.”
If you ever need our assistance in doing that, simply fill out a brief questionnaire or email us at info@iXsystems.com. We are standing by to help.

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The Shelter-in-Place restrictions are hugely impactful on many businesses and employees. Many of our clients are facing severe downturns and will have to fight through it. Retaining employees, customer relationships, and supply chains is not a simple process. As with many recessions, budgets will be cut, and there will be huge pressure to do more with less. Thankfully, one of the major benefits of Open Source infrastructure is that it provides these impacted organizations with an avenue to keep budgets under control.

Some of our clients are facing a different problem, instead seeing a sudden increase in demand as their products or services are critical to the response to COVID-19 or the basic functioning of our cities and countries. These businesses need to be able to scale cost-effectively knowing that the demand will drop when COVID-19 is defeated. Open Source also enables faster and more economic scaling as a lifeline for these organizations.

In both cases, Open Source enables businesses to be agile and control costs, whether they are growing or shrinking through an economic downturn. It is our mission at iXsystems to empower our customers to face either challenge through Open Source infrastructure and economics.

Open Source Economics

Open Source software has been part of our history for decades and has progressively been embedded within the industry over time. Proprietary Unix has given way to Linux and FreeBSD. Amazon, the company notorious for stretching a dime into a dollar, could never have built its cloud empire without Open Source tools and software. Apple helped turn its business around a decade and a half ago by leveraging Open Source. Even industry pioneers in proprietary and closed software such as Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM have had to come to terms with the fact that they too must embrace Open Source or eventually go the way of the dinosaur. The advantage that Open Source users have is that they get to choose how much software and support they wish to pay for. We call this “Open Source Economics.” If the industry giants mentioned above can use it to their advantage, so can you. And, iXsystems is here to help you access it.

When building infrastructure and applications, Open Source solutions shift negotiating power and let users decide whether the “free” version is acceptable (e.g., FreeNAS) or whether it’s worth having professional support (e.g., TrueNAS) to reduce the number and duration of issues.
If a supplier or partner underperforms, Open Source makes it easier to shift business to another partner that can use similar software. It avoids vendor lockup with exorbitant software and support contracts. Have you seen the standard licensing prices for the largest storage, virtualization, and database vendors?
Open Source puts the power back into the hands of the user/buyer/customer, where it belongs.

Choose your own Destiny

Many businesses may not be as immersed in Open Source software as iXsystems, but every business can benefit from an Open Source strategy. Open Source strategies let you choose your destiny and where you should invest your limited budgets.

In a recession, there are huge savings to be made from shifting projects toward an Open Source model. Typically, you can get all the features you need and at a fraction of the total price of proprietary software from enterprise vendors. In the future, you’ll be able to scale more cost-effectively and control your own destiny.

iXsystems is an Open Source partner for tough times

We have built our business model on providing Open Source software with professionally supported solutions using industry-standard hardware. We also use and contribute to Open Source software from the FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and SAMBA communities. This business model has successfully allowed us to not only survive but grow through the last recession and will help carry us through this next recession while still making great technical progress with our products. We are already seeing increases in FreeNAS downloads and inquiries since the pandemic began, which we take as a sign that many organizations are already leveraging the power of Open Source economics as a means to help them through this difficult period. At iXsystems, we couldn’t be more proud to be able to offer a lifeline to these organizations.
If your budgets are limited and you need to invest more in your own applications or staff, we can surely identify with that challenge. Our goal is to give you a set of choices from “free” to Enterprise with Gold Support. Start with “free” today, and if budgets improve, we can help you upgrade your infrastructure and support as required.

Whether it’s server or storage infrastructure, iXsystems will give you the benefits of Open Source economics. You get to choose whether to use FreeNAS or TrueNAS. Soon, we’ll make it even easier with TrueNAS CORE or TrueNAS Enterprise.
To address the immediate needs of our customers during this global crisis, we hand-selected and pre-configured two high-availability TrueNAS systems at special discounts for this quarter: 11TB of All-Flash TrueNAS for under $10K, and 1PB of powerful hybrid storage for under $70K. If you’d like access to special deals like this in the future, simply sign up for our newsletter.
Wishing you all the best during this time. If we can help you keep your business ticking through this recession, please contact us.

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For his testing, Jim Salter used OpenZFS 2.0 software that is in TrueNAS 12.0. One of the more interesting data points in the article was the major performance advantage of ZFS replication over standard rsync (which can also be used between ZFS and other file systems). ZFS replication (which is labeled “syncoid” – Open Source software that sets up ZFS replications) is more than 1,000 times faster at finding and sending the deltas between files. 

TrueNAS systems are built on the legendary stability of FreeNAS and the OpenZFS (ZFS) file system, leveraging the underlying ZFS technology to easily recover from ransomware and other active data threats. For more information, reach out to an iXsystems Solution Architect and get your completely free and no-pressure quote on the complete line of TrueNAS storage systems.

For more information on ZFS (or if you just need some pointers for your next FreeNAS or TrueNAS CORE build), check out these additional resources and let us know what articles or how-to videos you’d like to see next in the comments below.

ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance >> Read the Article (Credit Jim Salter for Ars Technica)
Introduction to ZFS >> Read the Article
ZFS Drive Size and Cost Comparison Spreadsheet >> Read the Article
iXsystems, FreeNAS, TrueNAS, and OpenZFS Videos >> Visit the Channel

The post Understanding How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

We are making some changes to the FreeNAS and TrueNAS bug tracker that’ll give you yet another way to help contribute and democratize enterprise storage!

As many of you know, we’ve historically had three ticket types available in our tracker: Bugs, Features, and Improvements, which are all fairly self-explanatory. After some discussion internally, we’ve decided to implement a new type of ticket, a “Suggestion”. These will be replacing Feature and Improvement requests for the TrueNAS Community, simplifying things down to two options: Bugs and Suggestions. This change also introduces a slightly different workflow than before.

One issue we’ve had in the past with Features and Improvements is that just about all the ideas submitted have been “good” ideas. The challenge was determining which ideas were “best” or most desired by the community, which at times made it difficult for engineers to determine which ought to be integrated into our development roadmap.

Just because we think something is a “good” idea, or a community member submits a well-laid out feature request, we didn’t have a great way of determining how many people are interested. This made the process of picking and choosing too arbitrary. To address this, the Suggestion ticket has been created to help us better gauge interest in particular requests by implementing the concept of “voting” into the workflow:

As demonstrated above, we’re going to be looking to the community to help “Vote” on issues to provide an indication to our team what kind of interest there is for any particular idea. Once a Suggestion has reached the vote threshold (10 votes for the time being), we will then put it into a Review state, and then make a determination of if/when it should land on our TrueNAS roadmap.

So, how do you vote for a Suggestion? Easy! Simply login to our ticket system, find your issue, and click the “Vote for this issue” link on the top right of each ticket. If you can’t find a Suggestion that addresses your issue, create a Suggestion and let us know why it’s important to you.

The rest is up to you! To help create interest or garner more support for your own suggestions, you can solicit your Suggestion requests here on the community forums, social media, Reddit, email campaigns to friends and colleagues, etc.

Democratizing storage requires collaboration, and we’re expecting that this new process will allow us to be more responsive to the needs and wants of our community and prioritize changes to the product accordingly.
Thanks for reading, and as always, feedback is welcome!

The post You Can Influence the TrueNAS CORE Roadmap! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Monitoring TrueNAS High-Availability is simpler than ever

TrueNAS 11.3-U2.1 is generally available as of 4/22/2020. This update is based on FreeNAS 11.3-U2 which has had over 50k deployments and received excellent community and third party reviews. The Release Notes are available on the iXsystems.com website.
TrueNAS 11.3 represents another major advancement in the quality and functionality of the leading Open Storage platform. TrueNAS 11.3 supports the very popular API and Web UI improvements of the previous FreeNAS release. It also introduces easy-setup wizards, major replication improvements, and over 500 other enhancements.
This new TrueNAS version also inherits an abundance of vetted FreeNAS features from previous releases, including the ability to use and manage jails, plugins, and VMs. All of these features have now been integrated with the TrueNAS platform’s high-availability and enclosure management features. TrueNAS 11.3 is available on the X-Series and M-Series platforms which scale from 10TB to over 10PB with hybrid or all-flash media. It is also available for prior Z-Series models as well.

New TrueNAS enclosure management provides visual drive and pool status

The TrueNAS 11.3 User Guide has been published. Key Features of TrueNAS 11.3 include the following major improvements:

• ZFS Replication: >8X performance (5TB/hr), Parallel tasks, Auto-resume
• Simplified Setup with Wizards: iSCSI, SMB, Pools, Networking, Replication
• SMB improvements: User quotas via AD, Shadow copies, ACL manager
• Easier Plugins: UI redesign, Categories, NAT reduces IP addresses
• Dashboard and Reporting: Faster response, more relevant data
• Configuration Management: API enables config save and audits
• Graphical enclosure and High-Availability management

The TrueNAS 11.3 series also resolves issues related to changes that Microsoft has made in Active Directory security defaults. These changes may cause major issues with older FreeNAS and TrueNAS releases when used in Active Directory environments. Please read this related Technical Note for more details.
With TrueNAS 11.3, the TrueCommand unified management interface can now also provide configuration save/restore functionality as well as auditing of configuration changes. TrueCommand also provides sophisticated reporting and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
TrueNAS 11.3 has been optimized for both high-performance SSDs and (Read Intensive) RI-SSDs based on lower cost QLC technology. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) validated the performance and cost benefits of TrueNAS 11.3 with extensive testing. ESG concluded that “The combination of ZFS, Open Source, and a lean sales force provides efficiencies that enable iXsystems to offer high performance, feature-rich solutions at high-value price points. We calculated a significant delta. Based on our testing and analysis, we found that iXsystems can typically offer up to double the performance at half the cost of their major competitors.”
A major investment in automated testing over the past 18 months has ensured significant improvements in software quality and ease of use, confirmed by FreeNAS 11.3 being the smoothest release in the history of the software. Customers should contact support@ixsystems.com if they are interested in the TrueNAS 11.3 upgrade. The upgrade is available from the 11.2 web interface.

TrueNAS 11.3 Screenshots

The Replication Wizard simplifies backup between two NAS systems

The Pool Manager makes it easier to set up larger pools

The post TrueNAS 11.3-U2 is Generally Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

We have previously announced the merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image and new naming convention. FreeNAS is becoming TrueNAS CORE. TrueNAS is becoming TrueNAS Enterprise. We’ve appreciated all of the positive feedback tremendously but noticed there were a few common questions from some of our more skeptical community members or ones that haven’t yet worked closely with iXsystems:
Will TrueNAS CORE still be open source and free?  
The answer is 100% yes.
Will TrueNAS CORE have fewer features than FreeNAS?  
The answer is 100% no. In fact, TrueNAS CORE will have MORE features than FreeNAS does today.
Will any “free” features now only be made available in TrueNAS Enterprise?
Nope. We have no intention of removing features from TrueNAS CORE. Hopefully, we’ve eased your minds. 🙂

Before we dive in and illustrate further the points above by comparing the features of FreeNAS, TrueNAS CORE, and TrueNAS Enterprise, let’s first do a quick recap of the benefits the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Unification plan delivers for all users and contributors:

• Rapid Development: Unified images accelerate software development and releases (for example, 12.0 is a major release that would normally have taken 9-12 months to release, and with these new efficiencies, we are bringing that closer to six months)
• Improved Quality: Reduced development redundancy and unified QA increases software quality and allows us to streamline testing
• Earlier Hardware Enablement: Staying in-sync with upstream OS versions will be easier, allowing earlier access to newer hardware drivers. For instance, 12.0 brings improved support for AMD EPYC / Ryzen platforms and enhanced NUMA support for more efficient CPU core handling.
• Simplified Documentation: Unified documentation eliminates redundancy such as separate user guides
• Reduced Redundancy: Unified web content and videos refer to one software family without the need for duplication
• Flexibility: Unified images enable simpler transitions or upgrades between editions
• Resource efficiency: Frees up developers to work on new features and related products
• OpenZFS 2.0: The planning for the “unified” 12.0 release began over a year ago and included the major investment in the development and integration of what will soon be released as “OpenZFS 2.0”. This effort is fast-forwarding delivery of advances like dataset encryption, major performance improvements, and compatibility with Linux ZFS pools. 

In a nutshell: huge efficiency gains equal higher quality software, released faster.

TrueNAS CORE Features

FreeNAS 11.3 has a very rich set of features, and TrueNAS CORE adds incrementally and significantly to that list. Again, no features are being harmed in the transition to TrueNAS CORE :-). In fact, “CORE” is an acronym that makes a commitment to our community that all the core functionality that FreeNAS users love will always be included in TrueNAS CORE, the best free NAS software (see what we did there?). 

The comprehensive feature list for TrueNAS 12.0 is actually quite enormous. To make it manageable, we’ve created a master feature list below. The features in black were existent in FreeNAS 11.3 and are shared by both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. The features in blue are new features being added with TrueNAS 12.0. The column to the right displays features that are available in TrueNAS Enterprise only. As you can see, no existing FreeNAS features have been moved over to the Enterprise column.

TrueNAS Enterprise has additional features that are needed for deployment in production applications. Many of these features are tied to the ability to support High Availability (HA) systems. 
By default, all new TrueNAS 12.0 features are included in both TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise. The feature additions for TrueNAS 12.0 can be summarized as:

Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file systems metadata and dedupe tables. This is one of the core features of OpenZFS 2.0.
Fusion Pools: The special SSD vdevs 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.
SSD Wear Monitoring: Any SSD (Boot, L2ARC, slog or vdev) can be monitored for wear and alerts created.
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 ZFS 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 ZFS Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times.
ZFS Linux Compatibility: Linux and FreeBSD are peer operating systems for OpenZFS 2.0. Compressed, deduplicated, and encrypted data can be efficiently replicated from a Linux host to a TrueNAS system for backup and archive. It is also possible to import a pool (drive set) from Linux to TrueNAS.
Accelerated ZFS: Several performance improvements have been made to reduce both drive IOPS and the CPU cycles required. More features and higher performance together is a big win for ZFS users :-).
OpenVPN Client and Server: VPNs provide security for remotely accessing storage services, such as SMB or NFS, across the Internet. This feature enables the OpenVPN Client or Server to be included in the NAS for simpler administration and lower costs. The other end of the VPN connection can be any OpenVPN client, such as another NAS, Firewall Device, or Personal Desktop/Laptop.  
Two Factor Authentication: For increased security, two factor authentication is highly desirable. TrueNAS ensures that a compromised root password cannot be used by itself to gain access to the administrator interface.
API Keys: Access to the REST / WebSockets API can now be done by API key. Keys can be created and revoked directly via the WebUI for additional security.
KMIP Support: Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) is an enterprise approach to securing systems and data through a centralized key management system. This feature will be available in TrueNAS Enterprise to secure drives or datasets. 
TrueCommand Dataset Management: TrueCommand is joined at the hip with TrueNAS and will provide some exciting features, including snapshotting, replicating, and migrating datasets between systems.
There should be something for everybody in this list. We hope you’re as excited by the increase in productivity as our devs are!

Onward to TrueNAS CORE!

TrueNAS 12.0 will go through the same NIGHTLY, ALPHA (Internal), BETA, RC1, RELEASE, UPDATE states that FreeNAS has gone through. There will be no changes to the software update process or the information available. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the community forums for this unification process and community feedback. 
The TrueNAS CORE 12.0 nightly builds have reached a stage where they are largely “feature complete”. Some UI polish and a lot of testing is needed to get to RELEASE deployment quality. We appreciate developers and testers who work with these early images. Bugs that are caught and reported early are going to have less impact on the final schedule.

Still the Best Free NAS

Still open, still free, just with more features and a new brand. Nothing much will change in the UI dashboard. However, TrueNAS CORE will have the option to use a FreeNAS theme for those as attached to the FreeNAS name as we are!

TrueNAS CORE pictured with the “FreeNAS theme” for diehards and nostalgists alike!
We hope you are sharing in the excitement for TrueNAS CORE & Enterprise as we move closer to our release date. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the forums or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us. In the meantime, download FreeNAS 11.3 today in preparation, and you can later upgrade to TrueNAS CORE 12.0 with a single click!

The post TrueNAS CORE is the new FreeNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Data and systems security is important to every business. The cost of security breaches can be extremely high and consumes IT administration resources. The best strategy is to avoid and minimize those breaches.
TrueNAS and FreeNAS provide many features to assist with security issues. Unlike other storage systems, the software is Open Source and enables anyone to audit the source code and report back to iXsystems about any potential vulnerabilities. iXsystems will then privately investigate, fix any vulnerabilities, and make our community aware how to best address the issues.
The new TrueNAS Security Hub empowers you with the information you need to maintain the security, integrity, and availability of your data in the midst of possible threats to your IT infrastructure such as vulnerabilities, malware, and ransomware.

The hub includes CVEs (“Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures”: publicly known information on security vulnerabilities and mitigations), errata (technical descriptions of unintended faults in hardware and/or software components), and articles (notices and best practices for security issues regarding TrueNAS and TrueCommand).

The hub also includes security information for FreeNAS and the upcoming release of TrueNAS CORE 12.0. For home and small business users, the goal is to make the latest software robust enough that using the hub is unnecessary.

For Security Officers, there is also a security white paper which details how security and privacy practices have been applied to TrueNAS. To obtain a copy of the white paper, please send an email to security-info@ixsystems.com.

We hope these newly available resources are beneficial to the community and provide System Administrators with the tools to operate their storage systems in a safe and secure manner. iXsystems is constantly improving the TrueNAS software, and there are already several more security features slated to be included in TrueNAS 12.0. To report a potential product-related privacy or security issue (incident, breach or vulnerability), please contact our Security Team at security[at]ixsystems.com.

Visit the TrueNAS Security Hub today for the latest in TrueNAS and FreeNAS security info.

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TrueNAS Optimized for VMware vSphere 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0

In a vSphere environment, TrueNAS acts as a high performance ESXi datastore using either iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), or NFS. Storage capacity and performance can be independently scaled, and the appliance can be managed natively in vCenter, via the TrueNAS vCenter plugin.
Key TrueNAS optimizations for VMware include:

• “VMware Ready” Storage Certification with vSphere for TrueNAS High Availability configurations. Details are available in the VMware Compatibility Guide.
• Enhanced Integration of VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) for efficient performance on iSCSI or FC block storage.
• Updated TrueNAS vCenter Plugin 3.2 supports the new APIs in vSphere 6.5, 6.7-U2, 6.7-U3 (a,b), and 7.0. The plugin enables admins to setup and monitor VMs and storage from within the vCenter web interface. Existing customers can contact support@ixsystems.com to gain access to the plugin.

The TrueNAS vCenter Plugin is described in this video. Technical highlights of Plugin 3.2 include:

• Simpler deployment in vCenter 6.7U3 (a,b) builds
• Improved security through encrypted API
• Management of scheduled periodic tasks
• Improved Capacity and Snapshot management
• Asynchronous updates to datastore status
• Improved management of NFS volumes

Kubernetes on TrueNAS

With vSphere 7, VMs and Containers (Kubernetes) are supported on the same physical infrastructure with TrueNAS. TrueNAS systems start with capacities as low as 10 TB and scale to 10 PB and 800K IOPS. Organizations of any size can configure one or more platforms to fit their capacity, performance, and budgetary needs.

TrueNAS Virtualization

Whether you are using vSphere 7.0, 6.7, or another stack and hypervisor, TrueNAS provides virtualization solutions that stretch your budget further. The utilization of Open Source economics reduces the costs of all-flash performance solutions and hybrid backup solutions.
For organizations with tens of thousands of VMs, multiple TrueNAS M50s can be logically configured via vCenter and managed as a single infrastructure via TrueCommand, a single-pane-of-glass management system. The ability to scale compute and storage independently can save significant costs in virtual environments.

Additional Resources & Information

Find out more information on integrating TrueNAS into your VMware environment:

• Virtualization Solutions, White Papers, Use Cases, and Case Studies
• General TrueNAS Information
• Video Overview of TrueNAS vCenter Plugin

Talk to iX

For any questions, please schedule a call with one of our TrueNAS experts or email sales@iXsystems.com, and we can help configure, size, and price a system that meets (and exceeds) the needs of your virtual environment.

The post TrueNAS Updates for VMware vSphere 7 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been separate-but-related members of the #1 Open Source storage software family since 2012. FreeNAS is the free Open Source version with an expert community and has led the pursuit of innovations like Plugins and VMs. TrueNAS is the enterprise version for organizations of all sizes that need additional uptime and performance, as well as the enterprise-grade support necessary for critical data and applications. 
From the beginning at iXsystems, we’ve developed, tested, documented, and released both as separate products, even though the vast majority of code is shared. This was a deliberate technical decision in the beginning but over time became less of a necessity and more of “just how we’ve always done it”. Furthermore, to change it was going to require a serious overhaul to how we build and package both products, among other things, so we continued to kick the can down the road. As we made systematic improvements to development and QA efficiency over the past few years, the redundant release process became almost impossible to ignore as our next major efficiency roadblock to overcome. So, we’ve finally rolled up our sleeves.
With the recent 11.3 release, TrueNAS gained parity with FreeNAS on features like VMs and Plugins, further homogenizing the code. Today, we announce the next phase of evolution for FreeNAS and TrueNAS. 
With the 12.0 release coming in the latter half of the year, we will not only bring more features and improvements than any release that has come before it, we will also unify both products into a single software image and name! This shift will have a great many benefits for users, but before we go into further detail, we’d like to first reassure you that there are no plans to stop releasing a free version, close the source or limit features. Just want to make sure that’s out of the way before we go on! 🙂

The Benefits

This isn’t just a union of convenience, there are major technical benefits for all users and contributors:

• Rapid Development: Unified images accelerate software development and releases (for example, 12.0 is a major release that would normally have taken 9-12 months to release, and with these new efficiencies, we are bringing that closer to six months)
• Improved Quality: Reduced development redundancy and unified QA increases software quality and allows us to streamline testing
• Earlier Hardware Enablement: Staying in-sync with upstream OS versions will be easier, allowing earlier access to newer hardware drivers.  For instance, 12.0 brings improved support for AMD EPYC / Ryzen platforms and enhanced NUMA support for more efficient CPU core handling.
• Simplified Documentation: Unified documentation eliminates redundancy such as separate user guides
• Deduplication of Effort: Unified web content and videos refer to one software family without the need for duplication
• Flexibility: Unified images enable simpler transitions or upgrades between editions
• Resource Efficiency: frees up developers to work on new features and related products
• Open ZFS 2.0: The planning for the “unified” 12.0 release began over a year ago and included the major investment in the development and integration of what will soon be released as “OpenZFS 2.0”. This effort is fast-forwarding delivery of advances like dataset encryption, major performance improvements, and compatibility with Linux ZFS pools.

Overall, this union provides a solid foundation for a more feature-rich future.

What to Expect

In the 11.3 release, FreeNAS and TrueNAS share over 95% of the same source code but are built into separate images, each with their own name. The Version 12.0 release will change this process by moving to one unified image with two different editions: a free, Open Source edition (this will never change!) and an enterprise edition.  
Both editions will have common Open Source code, unified documentation, and a shared product name. The web interface and REST APIs will be relatively unchanged from version 11.3 with only additions for new features. Our VP Engineering, Kris Moore, describes the change in process in this video blog.

Two Names Become One

For years we’ve talked longingly about unifying the images, documentation, and web content due to all of the efficiency gains and benefits to be had. The one thing that always held us back was the question of what to do with the name: after all, unification of the software meant that two distinct product names were no longer workable, and we’ve grown as attached to both names as have our Community and customers (and perhaps even more!).
On the one hand, we have the FreeNAS brand that everyone has come to know and love; it lets users know immediately the product doesn’t cost anything to use and also hints at the fact that it’s Open Source. On the other hand, TrueNAS is a better name for an enterprise product. Some may remember that TrueNAS was originally released as “FreeNAS Pro”, but the feedback received was that many companies didn’t take it seriously. They felt a product with “Free” in the name didn’t inspire the necessary confidence for critical infrastructure and data. Hence, the name TrueNAS was born to overcome that stigma, and the enterprise side of our business has grown reliably since then.
So, after many months of analysis, weighing pros and cons, and spirited debate, we’ve decided that the technical benefits and efficiencies from unifying the products are too significant to ignore and now overwhelmingly outweigh our attachment to names. Therefore, we’ve decided to merge the names to share the stronger enterprise brand, TrueNAS. By doing so, we continue to give all users the confidence to use the product in important and mission-critical applications, while still paying homage to FreeNAS through the use of a shark-themed icon in the logo. We also continue to emphasize the benefits of Open Source through the sub-moniker “Open Storage”.
We now present to you:

There will be two different editions: TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. Without any license keys, TrueNAS CORE provides all the same, unrestricted FreeNAS functionality you know and love, while the source code will still be Open Source and forever free to use. TrueNAS Enterprise will enable an extended feature set using a license key on supported platforms. This move elevates FreeNAS to the enterprise-grade quality levels of TrueNAS to further cement its position as the world’s #1 Open Storage OS.

TrueNAS CORE: always open, always Free NAS

The only thing changing is the name. FreeNAS will take on the name of “TrueNAS CORE”. More than just a “Free-NAS”, TrueNAS CORE is enterprise-quality software-defined storage that can be used without restrictions or cost. It is also the core of the full-fledged enterprise edition, TrueNAS Enterprise, which provides the additional fault-tolerance, performance, and support that businesses and critical applications require.
CORE is a commitment that all the core functionality that FreeNAS users love will be included in the best free NAS software. CORE also defines itself with the acronym:

We’re immensely proud of FreeNAS and its community. The change in name does not change the underlying FreeBSD OS, the FreeBSD-based license, or our commitment to free and Open Source software. Long-time FreeNAS diehards will have the option to use the existing FreeNAS name and logo in the banner of the web interface by simply selecting a FreeNAS theme from the dropdown in the upper right-hand action bar, if they so choose. 
Web visitors will eventually be forwarded to the new TrueNAS web pages, but that’s still a little while away. The freenas.org domain will remain in place, but over time we will use a TrueNAS domain to provide a common source of information. There will be no changes to community logins or newsletters. 
TrueNAS CORE 12.0 will have some major advances over FreeNAS 11.3. These include support for Fusion Pools (mixing SSD and HDD vdevs) and encrypted datasets. A more complete list of the hundreds of improvements will be made with the 12.0 BETA release announcement.  

TrueNAS Enterprise: the best value in enterprise storage

TrueNAS customers will see a smaller name change with the move to version 12.0 but will see a change to the new shark fin icon. The FreeNAS shark icon is well known, but this modernized icon represents the stealthy but mighty storage competitor that TrueNAS has become.

The new name is “TrueNAS Enterprise” and it inherits all the same enclosure management, high availability, and support that TrueNAS 11.3 benefits from. TrueNAS Enterprise systems will automatically inherit the TrueNAS CORE features and a pre-installed key unlocks enterprise features.

The TrueNAS 12.0 Preview

Everyone is invited to experience an early preview of TrueNAS 12.0. Nightly images will be available March 11th for anyone that has a spare system to test and develop with, and we would love to hear your feedback. Be sure to check out Fusion Pools and dataset encryption and let us know what you think.

We’ve started a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the community forums for this blog and community feedback. In general, we’re always looking for opinions and ideas on how we can improve TrueNAS products.  

Next Steps

TrueNAS CORE 12.0 will go through the same ALPHA, BETA, RC1, RELEASE states that FreeNAS has gone through. There will be no changes to the software update process or the information available. The process will be more efficient within iXsystems, and we expect to deliver our users more with the same resources we have today. TrueNAS CORE 12.0 is planned for release in Q3 2020, which will be a much shorter development cycle for a release of this magnitude, thanks to this change.
Some users have asked us whether there will be a paid option to upgrade a system running TrueNAS CORE to Enterprise? The change in the release process makes that upgrade more possible, and we will be investigating options to enable this. There will also be opportunities to develop more radical improvements to TrueNAS functionality. Please contact us if your organization needs something that isn’t yet available.
As always, a huge thanks goes out to our community and customers for your continued support in helping us democratize enterprise storage. We are excited to work side by side with you on this next phase of the FreeNAS and TrueNAS journey. Many more great things to come!
For more information on TrueNAS 12.0, please check out our new blog about the features coming in TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise.

The post FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. Unfortunately, these new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet.
FreeNAS and TrueNAS users that utilize Active Directory should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March.
Full details are available in this iXsystems Technical Note about LDAP channel binding and LDAP signing.  
Users not using Active Directory are unaffected by these Microsoft updates and therefore can update their FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems at their leisure.
SMB Sharing on FreeNAS and TrueNAS
FreeNAS and TrueNAS are used to provide SMB shares in over 80% of deployments. Windows, Mac, and now Linux clients use SMB to share files. In many cases, SMB3 is preferred to NFSv3 and includes some file integrity advantages because the client behavior is well defined. SMB clients gain the advantages of the highly robust OpenZFS file system and all the replication and administration tools that FreeNAS and TrueNAS provide.
SMB3 is usually deployed in organizations with Active Directory to manage user authentication and permissions. All Windows Servers and FreeNAS/TrueNAS units can be configured to use the same security control.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS Release 11.3
The good news is that version 11.3 includes many improvements to SMB and Active Directory support beyond the compatibility with the new Microsoft security patches: 

• The methods of communicating with the Active Directory Domain Controller now use strong authentication. The strong authentication methods are either SSL-encrypted transport or signed sasl_gssapi bind (Kerberos). This is the additional feature needed to avoid disruption with the change in security defaults.
• Setup wizards for SMB and Active Directory have been added. The user feedback on ease of deployment has been excellent.
• SMB and OpenZFS snapshots have been better integrated. Now ZFS snapshots are automatically visible to clients’ systems as Shadow Copies with all the previous versions of files. A file from an old snapshot can be copied and restored to a current share without any help from a storage administrator.  More impressively, only snapshots with file changes are visible to the client so it’s much easier to find the right snapshot.
• Tools and best practices have been added to improve the ability to share the same files with NFS and SMB clients. NFSv3 has some weaknesses where clients can be configured to ignore network locking, but as long as best practices are followed, mixed protocol shares can be safely operated.
• ACL manager has been added to provide an easy-to-use web UI to set permissions on an SMB share. This greatly simplifies SMB setup and reduces the setup time.
• ZFS Replication between SMB datasets to a backup system has been greatly improved. The speed of replication on high bandwidth links has been increased by 8X to over 10Gbit/s (5 TB per hour). For large datasets, these replication tasks now support a suspend and resume model that can withstand a network outage. This is probably the most efficient SMB share replication available.
• ZFS user quotas are now exposed as NT quotas to SMB clients. Windows users can manage these quotas using File Explorer, and Linux and FreeBSD users can use the smbcquotas utility for quota management.

Please contact us if we can help you with your next SMB server deployments. 

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• In a virtualization environment, the system could sustain over 100K IOPS averaging 24KB in size. This is around 2,600 MB/s with 70% writes and over 4,000 IOPS per SSD.
• Typical latency under 1ms below 60,000 IOPS. This workload would be typical for systems with over 3000 VMs and 50 hosts.
• In a file-sharing environment with large files, the system could provide over 4,000 MB/s with any mix of Reads and Writes.
• The impact of enabling compression and snapshots was near zero. Encryption, using SEDs, can also be provided with no performance impact.
• NFS, SMB, and iSCSI demonstrated high bandwidth. Each could deliver performance that was appropriate for their respective applications.

The same TrueNAS can simultaneously deliver NFS, SMB, and iSCSI services to many clients. When one protocol is less active, the performance is available for the other protocols. This is a major performance and cost advantage of TrueNAS unified storage.
The performance of TrueNAS depends heavily on the workload and the specific network and storage configuration that is being used, which is also why TrueNAS systems can all be easily configured and tuned based on the application performance need. Reports like these help us gain more insight into performance characteristics and how we can both estimate and improve them.
The TrueNAS combination of flexible performance and Open Source economics helps our customers meet performance targets with lower capital costs, less complexity, and technical support they need for reliable infrastructure.
If you have a performance workload, let us know what its characteristics are, and our team can help design a TrueNAS system that delivers the performance you need so that we make sure you don’t mistakenly buy a Peterbilt to run a quarter mile or a Lambo to drive in LA traffic.
To read more about ESG’s technical performance report on the TrueNAS M50, download the full technical review here.

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An original iXsystems logo can be spotted as the future of OpenZFS is shaped during one of the “Hallway Tracks” in-between official sessions

Ecosystem Tooling
While OpenZFS is central to a robust storage stack, the stack itself is an ecosystem in which a number of components work together to produce a solution. The journey of developers between different OpenZFS operating systems has produced palpable frustration over the various tools that are absent on any given platform. The status reports “libshare on Linux is Broken”, “A Device by Any Other Name: Common Pitfalls in Device Naming for ZFS on Linux“, and “Illumos Brings the SAS” all helped vocalize this frustration and offered pragmatic solutions to the issues encountered. Users and developers should rightfully ask, “Why can’t this be as simple as it is on that other OS?” The two talks on debugging by Tom Caputi of Datto and Serapheim Dimitropoulos of Delphix gave great overviews of various debugging strategies for what may as well be searches for digital needles in digital haystacks.
The presentations on the second day wrapped up with an eye-opening report on Multi Actuator hard drives by Muhammad Ahmad of Seagate who sat down with Matt Ahrens to explore the performance characteristics of OpenZFS on this exciting new technology. “MA HDDs” can act as either a single drive with the promise of double the performance or two independent drives. Alexander Motin of iXsystems is currently evaluating these drives on FreeBSD to ensure that FreeBSD and FreeNAS are ready for their arrival on the market.
On a humorous note, Don Brady of Delphix used his hackathon time to work on a “metaslab worst-fit allocator” that would introduce data fragmentation for testing. This report won first place among the hackathon reports.

The road to OpenZFS 2.0 will be an exciting one and we have the diverse OpenZFS team from around the world to thank for navigating us through it!

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OpenZFS Avoids the Costs of Proprietary Storage Systems

Many enterprises have endured the pain of having proprietary storage systems abandoned in one way or another by the vendor. At that point, feature enhancements stop and support ends or begins to lag. Data security can even become an issue. As a result, many enterprises have been forced into costly and time-consuming migrations or into paying punitive maintenance and support costs.
OpenZFS storage shifts power away from the vendor to the customer. OpenZFS has multiple vendors competing to provide the best value without vendor lock-in. Businesses can gain access to a complete solution with professional support, access to the community, complete documentation and source code, and an ability to migrate data easily. This competition reduces total storage costs both in terms of initial investment and long-term cost of ownership.

OpenZFS has a Rich History and an Active Ecosystem

A team of talented engineers at Sun Microsystems created ZFS in 2001. In 2005, Sun released ZFS as Open Source software as part of OpenSolaris. Consequently, ZFS was ported to multiple operating systems. In 2010, Oracle purchased Sun and stopped releasing enhancements to OpenSolaris, effectively reverting ZFS to closed source.
Development of Open Source ZFS continued, but without the coordination that Sun had provided. In 2013, OpenZFS was founded as a multivendor initiative to promote awareness of Open Source ZFS and to facilitate easier sharing of code among operating system platforms. This collaboration will ensure consistent reliability, functionality, and performance of all ZFS systems, regardless of their base Operating System (OS).
Matt Ahrens, one of the original authors of ZFS, continues to be actively involved with OpenZFS. In a recent presentation, he highlighted the degree of active open development that continues under the OpenZFS banner.

The OpenZFS website currently includes the logos of 33 companies delivering products with OpenZFS as an integral part. These include iXsystems, Datto, Delphix, Intel, Nexenta by DDN, and others. iXsystems FreeNAS and TrueNAS are the most widely deployed ZFS-based solutions, with more than one million deployed TrueNAS and FreeNAS storage systems.

OpenZFS is Scalable Open Source Enterprise Storage

ZFS is a proven file system suitable for enterprise storage. OpenZFS storage is a best-in-class open storage technology that is widely deployed in enterprises. ZFS provides a rich set of data services. These include snapshots, clones, replication, compression, and encryption.
The reliability of ZFS is very well known. Integrated into the file system is a RAID algorithm capable of single, dual, and even triple parity. All data is committed via a Redirect-on-Write model that avoids any overwrites of existing data. A Write log is maintained to ensure integrity during unexpected power events or hardware failures.
ZFS can deliver enterprise-class high availability when implemented as a dual-controller storage system. This scale-up design is familiar to, and well understood by, enterprise technology professionals.
Its multi-tiered ZFS caching architecture is both efficient and scalable. ZFS can take full advantage of ongoing advances in persistent memory. This includes the option to use low-latency NVDIMMs and NVMe SSDs, as represented in this diagram of the iXsystems TrueNAS M50 storage system. The efficiency of ZFS translates into lower costs for both storage capacity and performance.

Consequently, OpenZFS-based systems can be built to suit a wide variety of storage use cases. These include high-performance all-flash arrays for critical business applications, general-purpose storage, and secondary storage. Storage clients can use industry-standard protocols such as iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and in some cases even Fibre Channel and S3 object storage APIs to access the ZFS-based storage.

OpenZFS Delivers Compelling Economic Benefits

Enterprises can trust business-critical data to OpenZFS running on highly available dual-controller storage systems with enterprise-class commercial support. These are available as pre-configured appliances at very affordable prices. For example, iXsystems recently offered pre-configured dual-controller TrueNAS systems for purchase with raw capacities of 40 TB for $9,900 and 6 PB for $450,000. Put in public cloud terms, that is 6PB of enterprise-class storage for a one-time acquisition cost of $0.075 per GB.
Even less expensive options bring ZFS to non-HA servers for non-critical workloads. Businesses can build their own software-defined storage system by installing free OpenZFS software such as FreeNAS on servers already owned by the business. FreeNAS storage systems are also available as pre-configured appliances. These inexpensive systems can even serve as replication targets for commercially supported systems.
Organizations can further reduce operating costs by using management applications to automate administrative tasks. These include managing disk failures, updating software, analyzing capacity needs, and creating new data shares. ZFS-aware unified management systems such as TrueCommand can operate across both HA appliances and off-the-shelf servers simultaneously.

OpenZFS Gives Enterprises Control and Long-Term Cost Savings

The flexibility of OpenZFS to provide new features, services, platforms, and vendors on top of an enterprise-proven Open Source file system is a powerful proposition. OpenZFS-based storage systems empower enterprises to take control of their budgets and destinies without sacrificing data services or commercial support. When any organization is considering a new storage solution, it should give strong consideration to open storage for long-term cost savings.
*This article was written by Ken Clipperton, Lead Analyst for Storage at DCIG. The original article can be found here: https://dcig.com/2019/11/the-compelling-economic-benefits-of-openzfs-storage.html 

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After more than a year of success and traction with the first generation AMD EPYC 7000 CPUs (formerly known as “Naples”), iXsystems has introduced AMD’s second generation EPYC 7002 processor family (formerly known as “Rome”) into its line of iX servers. AMD Rome brings exciting possibilities and truly “EPYC” value to the table with incredible scalability, increased memory speeds and bandwidth, bountiful next-gen I/O capability, and cost efficiency leadership.
EPYC 7002 is uniquely scalable from 8 to 64 cores in both single and dual socket versions. More importantly, pricing per core scales linearly, making high core count processors predictably priced and affordable at less than $80 per core. As an example, a system with a single 64-core processor has lower cost, power and space requirements than a system with two 32-core processors.

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

The architecture for EPYC processors is a major change with processor chiplets and an IO Hub. The second generation EPYC 7002 uses a 7nm process for its processors to get lower costs and improved power efficiency. Scalability is provided with more chiplets and more cores per chiplet.
The IO Hub uses a 14nm process and is the first to support PCI Gen4 with 20Gb/s per lane. This will enable 200Gb networking capabilities per NIC. With more than 128 PCIe lanes on a single socket processor, there is phenomenal bandwidth of over 250 GB/s.
The additional PCIe lanes make EPYC very well suited to NVMe drives. Each NVMe drive can support >2GB/s of bandwidth and accelerate I/O sensitive applications. You can run FreeNAS or ZFS on these NVMe drives and replicate to a TrueNAS hybrid storage system.
Initial validation and deliveries of EPYC 7002 systems have gone very well. Newer motherboards with Gen4 support have been validated with Gen4 NICs. Broadcom has a dual 100GbE NIC that can run at line rate on both ports. Our friends at Liqid have developed a stunning 32TB SSD with 24 GB/s of bandwidth using 16 lanes of PCIe Gen4.
For an in depth review of the EPYC 7002, we recommend this excellent article from ServeTheHome.

Why go to Rome?

Apart from the unique architecture, EPYC’s high core counts at lower costs are very useful in applications where cost per socket and cost per core are critical.
Virtualization software and many database applications are licensed per socket. The 64 core sockets can reduce software costs by more than 60%.
High performance compute workloads like EDA, simulation, and analytics can benefit from the higher core count per socket.
Single socket servers with high I/O requirements can also benefit from the additional PCIe lanes. Some AI/ML workloads can now use a single EPYC CPU with multiple GPUs.

These Servers are EPYC

There are many server options that can utilize AMD EPYC 7002 processors. Examples of servers that are recommended include servers for Virtualization, Analytics, and Machine Learning.
Virtualization: 2U 4Node
Each dual socket node supports 128 Cores, 1TB RAM, 6 x low cost SATA or NVMe SSDs, and 2 or more 100GbE ports. With over 500 Cores in 2U, this system delivers more than 500 VMs with a very low TCO. It’s an ideal compute node for a high performance private cloud.

Analytics: 1U Single socket
With 10 x U.2 NVMe bays and dual 100GbE ports, this system delivers extreme storage bandwidth for analytics and big data applications. Select the core count to match the application and then build out a powerful cluster.

Machine Learning: 1U with 4 GPUs
This single socket system delivers 64GB/s of bandwidth for GPUs and dual 100Gbe. It is ideally suited as the building block for an AI/ML GPU farm.

EPYC Servers Need 100GbE Storage

To get the most of 100GbE servers, there will be an increasing need for high bandwidth and cost-effective storage. The TrueNAS M-Series provides the high bandwidth iSCSI, NFS, and SMB capabilities needed to satisfy these EPYC servers. For example, ten of the 2U 4Node Virtualization Servers paired with a TrueNAS M50 (150+TB SSD storage) would deliver up to 5,000 VMs in a little over half a rack.
Contact iXsystems if you would like more information on these EPYC platforms!

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FreeNAS 11.3 will represent another major advancement in the quality and functionality of the leading Open Storage platform. Building upon the very popular API and Web UI improvements of FreeNAS 11.2, FreeNAS 11.3 introduces easy-setup wizards, major replication improvements, and over 500 other enhancements.
FreeNAS 11.3 has now reached the important milestone of a public BETA release. Release notes with full feature descriptions and download instructions are provided in the FreeNAS Library. As with any pre-release software, we recommend against using it in production environments and make sure your data is backed up before trying it out. Please report any bugs or issues.
TrueNAS 11.3 is also inheriting an abundance of FreeNAS features from previous releases including the upgraded web UI as well as the ability to use and manage jails, plugins, and VMs. All of these features have now been integrated with TrueNAS high-availability and hardware management features. TrueNAS 11.3 is in a Preview release form and will be released after further software quality validation. TrueNAS is available on the X-Series and M-Series platforms which scale from 10TB to over 10PB with hybrid or all-flash media.
Key Features of FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 include the following:

• Improved ZFS Replication: 8x performance, Parallel tasks, Auto-resume, Setup wizard
• New Wizards for faster setup: iSCSI, SMB, Pools, Networking
• SMB Improvements: User quotas via AD, Shadow copies, ACL manager
• Plugin improvements: UI redesign, Categories, NAT reduces IP addresses
• Dashboard and Reporting Improvements: Faster response, more relevant data
• Configuration Management: API enables config save and audits in TrueCommand
• TrueNAS Features: Web UI, HA Jails/Plugins/VMs, Graphical enclosure management

Due to a major investment in quality assurance and automated testing over the past 18 months, we are confident that there will be significant improvements in software quality and ease of use relative to Beta versions of previous releases. FreeNAS is benefiting from the large investment in software QA for TrueNAS products. TrueNAS 11.2 has been the highest quality release we have ever deployed and FreeNAS 11.2 has benefited.
In addition, a new TrueCommand release is on the way. For the uninitiated, TrueCommand is a unified management system that monitors and controls both FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems from a “single pane of glass”. TrueCommand 1.1 will be available on November 12, and chief among its new features are the ability to save system configurations and provide audit logging of any changes made to FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 systems under management.
Rest assured the iXsystems team is working around the clock to get FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 to its release phase during Q1 of 2020. Thanks to all the community members and clients who provided extensive feedback on FreeNAS 11.2. That feedback has significantly helped create a more powerful and simpler environment for managing your data. We look forward to receiving your feedback on FreeNAS 11.3.

11.3 Screenshots

The Dashboard provides an intuitive view of system status

The Replication Wizard simplifies backup between two NAS systems

The Pool Manager makes it easier to set up larger pools

TrueNAS enclosure management provides visual confirmation of drive and pool status

Plugin selection and installation is greatly simplified

About FreeNAS
FreeNAS is the leading Open Source software-defined storage operating system. With its proven OpenZFS filesystem, powerful web interface, and full suite of data protection features, FreeNAS can be installed on virtually any x86 hardware platform to create a highly-reliable and efficient storage system that is accessible over block, file, or object protocols. To optimize FreeNAS for specific solutions, an ecosystem of plugins and VMs provide media server, backup management, cloud collaboration and a variety of other network applications.
iXsystems proudly develops and maintains FreeNAS as the Community Edition of the TrueNAS Family. It has been deployed on over a million systems, from homes to Fortune 100 enterprises, and is supported by a vibrant, technical community at www.freenas.org. For organizations that need high-availability, Enterprise support, or best-in-class performance, TrueNAS appliances are available at www.ixsystems.com/TrueNAS.

The post FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 make their Debuts appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Data integrity first
Checksums, copy-on-write, unlimited snapshots, and replication are all native to TrueNAS. The OpenZFS file system is designed for data integrity first to ensure files saved to the storage pool are kept intact as long as needed. Any changes are recorded and checked, while the snapshots can be cloned and replicated to separate systems. Deploying multiple TrueNAS or FreeNAS systems allows for easy disaster recovery at no extra cost. For backup and archival, no storage helps protect against corruption more than TrueNAS.

Updated guidelines for Veeam
Certified on release, iXsystems has updated its recommendations for sizing and optimizing performance for Veeam workloads. The quick reference guide is designed to help explain the features and optimum configurations used when benchmarking Veeam backup. For more information view the guide at the link here.
Key highlights:

• TrueNAS is Veeam certified and scales to over 7.5 PB in a single share.
• Increasing proxies and using a scale-out repository dramatically improve performance.
• Capacity must also take into account storage snapshots; plan for more than the current online systems use for optimal data recovery and recovery.
• More information about setting an iSCSI or SMB share, and links to Veeam Best Practices all included.

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For more information, you can visit our page to learn more about backups, replication, and disaster recovery with TrueNAS. We’ve conducted countless backup deployments and have decades of experience in providing storage and server solutions driven by Open Source for thousands of clients, many which have been with us for over a decade. Learn more about TrueNAS by emailing info@ixsystems.com, or calling 1.855.GREP.4.IX.