Enter the Dragonfish: TrueNAS Brings Performance Gains and Tightens Security

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April 23, 2024

After a successful BETA release and the fastest adoption of Release Candidate software in TrueNAS history, TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 “Dragonfish” roars onto the scene  in its official RELEASE today!

As the fourth major version of TrueNAS SCALE, 24.04 brings forward major performance improvements, new features, and expanded hardware support. Dragonfish is expected to be the best-ever TrueNAS version with significant improvements in the following areas:

Quality has been improved and demonstrated with a tremendously successful RC.1 release. Verified users of prior versions (Bluefin & Cobia) rate their experiences 4.9 out of 5.0 stars. Based upon the record number of early adopters and simultaneously low number of reported issues, we expect it to be one of the most adopted and stable releases of TrueNAS ever.

Security continues to be  enhanced through the additions of logging authorization and configuration events. SMB client auditing improves share security. NIST 800-209 security and Immutable snapshots can be enabled using Restricted Admins in the Enterprise version.

Performance has been improved through ZFS ARC changes which allow full memory utilization, identical to CORE, and improvements in ZFS read-ahead caching. These improvements allow better parallelism in the primary NFS and SMB protocols, cutting your response time down and pushing your peak bandwidth up. Metadata handling has also improved, allowing for more than 10x speedups in directory listings.

Functionality and ease-of-use continue to grow with the inclusion of SMB/NFS share wizards, reintegration of Netdata monitoring, support for SMB share importing via Syncthing, and many other features. There’s even a new community-supported feature for Linux Sandboxes, a new jail-like capability.  Explore the TrueNAS Dragonfish Documentation or the software for the other features.

With the previous Cobia release, 40% of the TrueNAS Community has adopted SCALE. Dragonfish is expected to take this to well over 50%. We’re looking forward to the Community’s feedback as we continue through release and maintenance updates.

Added Features

The Dragonfish BETA announcement listed most of the additional features in Dragonfish. A later RC1 blog highlighted the many SMB file sharing improvements. This included the introduction of wizards to improve the Share Creation workflow. Users can now add shares during dataset creation or datasets during share creation – both methods are supported.

SMB Client Auditing has been added to the TrueNAS web UI. This audit trail provides TrueNAS administrators the ability to monitor client activity graphically through Web-Driven queries, as well as exporting of reports for offline auditing compliance. Live client sessions for both the SMB and NFS file-sharing protocols can also be viewed and managed from the TrueNAS web UI, allowing you to identify which files are open and in use by connected users. Use the new Sessions icon on the Sharing screen to explore this new functionality.

Finally, because we’d like to hear the community’s thoughts on these new features and changes, a new rating and feedback system has been introduced. Using the Send Feedback button available in the top navigation bar, you can rate any TrueNAS web UI page, report a bug, and suggest a new feature or improvement for inclusion into TrueNAS, all from the comfort of your TrueNAS web UI. Integrated screenshot functionality and collection of debug files are also available.

H-series

New Hardware Support

TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 includes support for the newest member of the TrueNAS Enterprise family, the versatile H-Series. With dual controllers for high-availability, the H-Series brings five-nines uptime to the Edge segment, letting small and medium enterprises benefit from the same time-tested OpenZFS filesystem and familiar TrueNAS management interface. TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 is available for all hardware offered by iXsystems, from compact and affordable Mini systems up to the all-NVMe TrueNAS F-Series.

Join the Growing SCALE Community

With the release of TrueNAS SCALE 24.04, there’s never been a better time to join the growing TrueNAS community. Download the SCALE 24.04 installer or upgrade from within the TrueNAS web UI today, and experience True Data Freedom for yourself.  Then, make sure you’ve signed up for the newly relaunched TrueNAS Community Forums to share your experience.

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