TrueNAS

Lore & Background

The TrueNAS project began as FreeNAS, created by Olivier Cochard-Labbé in October 2005, based on the m0n0wall firewall and FreeBSD 6.0. Volker Theile joined in 2006 and later assumed leadership. In 2009, Theile concluded that FreeNAS required substantial rewrites and proposed migrating to Debian Linux, but Cochard-Labbé preferred FreeNAS to remain on FreeBSD, leading Theile to fork FreeNAS and create OpenMediaVault. Development of FreeNAS was taken over by iXsystems, a company founded by original Berkeley Software Design developers who supported the PC-BSD OS and sold storage servers. FreeNAS 8.x was released in 2010 after a substantial rewrite, integrating OpenZFS. iXsystems introduced the 'TrueNAS' branding for enterprise hardware appliances and a proprietary OS based on FreeNAS, adding features such as high availability and Fibre Channel support. In July 2020, iXsystems announced TrueNAS Scale, a Linux-based 'scale-out' project based on TrueNAS Core. In 2021, the commercial and free operating systems were merged into a single codebase under the TrueNAS branding, with the free edition renamed TrueNAS Core. In 2022, iXsystems released TrueNAS Scale, a Debian Linux port; the 'Scale' moniker honored the scale-out capabilities of Gluster File System and Kubernetes, though both were deprecated shortly thereafter. At the end of 2023, citing higher adoption of Linux-based TrueNAS Scale, iXsystems announced that FreeBSD-based TrueNAS Core would receive only maintenance and security updates. In January 2025, iXsystems announced that Scale had reached full feature and performance parity with Core, and Scale would be renamed TrueNAS, available as the free Community Edition and the paid Enterprise edition, with all future development on the Linux branch. The announcement recommended upgrading to version 25.04 'Fangtooth' by mid-late 2025. In 2025, to avoid confusion, iXsystems began doing business as TrueNAS.

Reader's Guide

TrueNAS represents a significant evolution in network-attached storage, originating from the FreeNAS project in 2005 and transitioning through a fork and a Linux-based port to become a unified platform. Its notable legacy includes the integration of OpenZFS, providing robust file and block-storage services, and the ability to run on low-specification hardware, which reduces e-waste. The project's history reflects a dispute over operating system direction—FreeBSD versus Debian Linux—that led to the creation of OpenMediaVault and ultimately to iXsystems taking over FreeNAS development. The later introduction of TrueNAS Scale as a Linux-based port, and the eventual deprecation of the FreeBSD-based Core in favor of the Linux branch, marks a strategic shift toward scale-out capabilities and containerized applications, though the Gluster and Kubernetes components were deprecated shortly after release. By 2025, the unification of the product line under the TrueNAS name, with both a free Community Edition and a paid Enterprise edition, established a single codebase for future development. The company's rebranding to TrueNAS in 2025 further solidified the product's identity.

Did You Know?

• TrueNAS can be installed on a computer as low-spec as an Intel Pentium 4 64-bit with 1 GB of RAM.
• Volker Theile forked FreeNAS to create OpenMediaVault after a disagreement over migrating to Debian Linux.
• In 2025, iXsystems began doing business as TrueNAS to avoid confusion between the company and the product.