Enterprise-strength FreeBSD-based TrueNAS releases v13.0
- Reference: 1652286609
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/11/truenas_13_released/
- Source link:
The company now offers three separate OS products. Two are based on FreeBSD 13: TrueNAS CORE, which replaces FreeNAS, and the commercial TrueNAS Enterprise, available on the company's storage hardware. Complementing them is a new Linux-based product, TrueNAS SCALE.
It may not be a household name, but iXsystems, Inc is an established player which has been around in various forms for over 30 years.
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The company was originally founded as Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDi) to sell a commercial version of BSD Unix for 386 PCs. Over the decades, it's employed many notable Unix luminaries, and after various acquisitions, spin-offs and re-acquisitions, it now sells a range of storage-focused servers and develops the TrueNAS family of operating systems.
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FreeNAS also has a complicated [4]history , involving several forks and [5]changes of name , but is now all grown up, complete with a smart new suit.
What used to be a separate product is now just the free tier of TrueNAS' offerings, rebranded as TrueNAS Core; iXsystems sells the enterprise version pre-installed on its [6]hardware .
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The free [8]Core edition is designed for standalone operation, but it's functionally complete: it supports all the same storage protocols and so on as its commercial sibling, including the company's paid-for [9]TrueCommand management tools.
The paid [10]Enterprise edition adds [11]FiberChannel , VMware [12]VAAI and OpenStack [13]Cinder support, plus high-availability and failover functions.
The new versions of both products are based on FreeBSD [14]13.0 plus version [15]2.1.0 of [16]the OpenZFS filesystem . On top of this, the company has built its own [17]web UI , mostly implemented in Javascript using the [18]Angular framework.
Open-source storage that doesn't suck? Our man tries to break TrueNAS [19]READ MORE
TrueNAS CORE has somewhat imposing [20]system requirements , including 8GB of RAM and a dual-core CPU.
In testing at The Reg FOSS desk, after an initial warning, it installed and ran fine in 6GB of RAM and we suspect that a low-end home deployment would be happy in less. After booting, the OS reports well under 2GB of RAM in use, although after a while this free space gets used by the ZFS cache.
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We also successfully imported a 6TB RAIDZ array, originally created using Ubuntu Server 18.04 on a Raspberry Pi 4, and TrueNAS CORE happily mounted it and shared it across the network. The only amendment we'd make to the Reg 's [22]2016 look at TrueNAS 9 would be to note that the UI has been modernized and now looks very smart.
One advantage of FreeNAS was that it happily installed onto and ran from a USB key. Users upgrading to TrueNAS Core might therefore be concerned by the comment that "You don't need an SSD boot device, but we discourage using a spinner or a USB stick for obvious reasons."
We put an old 160GB notebook hard disk into an eSATA enclosure and plugged it into the back of an HP MicroServer N54L, which worked perfectly.
The OS formats its boot medium as ZFS, and when we asked iXsystems, the company expressed concern about the lifespan of random old USB keys, which is a fair point, but we would like to see this addressed and made a standard option.
An option we weren't expecting to see in a free NAS OS was TrueNAS Core's rich support for hosting VMs and plugins. Using the FreeBSD [23]bhyve hypervisor, TrueNAS can host various guest OSes, including Windows, and the company also offers a wide range of [24]apps that can run on your storage server.
As well as media and streaming servers, Bittorrent downloaders and so on, which you might expect, there are also email and messaging tools, database servers, continuous integration tools and more.
Lastly comes perhaps the most interesting new offering: an entirely new storage OS, [25]TrueNAS SCALE .
Last year, our sister site [26]Blocks & Files took a look at this , but since then the first version of the product, codenamed "Angelfish", has seen its first significant update, to version [27]22.02.1 . The company is [28]planning a second version, "Bluefin", later this year.
[29]Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB
[30]OpenZFS 2.1.3 bugfix brings compatibility with Linux 5.16
[31]Three storage hardware devices, a cash raise and Oracle gets blocked
[32]FreeNAS releases version 11, so let us put the unpleasantness of failed V.10 behind us
Surprisingly for a very BSD-centric company, SCALE is based on Debian Linux. On top is much the same middleware stack as on the existing BSD-based offerings, but being based on a Linux kernel allows SCALE to do some things difficult for FreeBSD, such as support Kubernetes and the [33]Gluster distributed filesystem.
SCALE is not intended to rival Linux-based NAS OSes such as OpenMediaVault. Rather, it is the company's entry into the enterprise distributed-storage market [34]which SUSE recently left . iXsystems told The Reg that TrueNAS deployments grew over 70 per cent during the pandemic, and it is predicting a $100M run rate. It already has 16,000 TrueNAS SCALE installations and is adding 100 percent per quarter.
Many companies have found that the "freemium" sales model can be difficult, but iXsystems' model of giving away the unsupported version, but selling hardware with the professional product pre-installed, seems to be working out, and it is optimistic that SCALE will grow strongly and help it reach new markets. ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YnwyBy@YpTsgAKY6YJ4RCAAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YnwyBy@YpTsgAKY6YJ4RCAAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YnwyBy@YpTsgAKY6YJ4RCAAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.truenas.com/freenas/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/16/freenas_corral_goes_hyperconverged/
[6] https://www.truenas.com/systems-overview/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YnwyBy@YpTsgAKY6YJ4RCAAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/
[9] https://www.truenas.com/truecommand/
[10] https://www.truenas.com/truenas-enterprise/
[11] https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/05/06/cisco-controls-the-slow-drain-with-64gig-fibre-channel/
[12] https://core.vmware.com/resource/vmware-vsphere-apis-array-integration-vaai
[13] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Cinder
[14] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/announce/
[15] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.1.0
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/12/openzfs_213/
[17] https://github.com/truenas/webui
[18] https://angular.io/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2016/10/18/truenas_review/
[20] https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/gettingstarted/corehardwareguide/
[21] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YnwyBy@YpTsgAKY6YJ4RCAAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2016/10/18/truenas_review/
[23] https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve
[24] https://www.truenas.com/apps/
[25] https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/
[26] https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/10/28/ixsystems-open-sourcery-scale-out-file-block-object-hci-software/
[27] https://www.truenas.com/blog/truenas-scale-22-02-1/
[28] https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/#Roadmap
[29] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/02/synology_enterprise_nas_drives/
[30] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/12/openzfs_213/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/17/three_storage_hardware_devices_a_cash_raise_and_oracle_gets_blocked/
[32] https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/15/freenas_11/
[33] https://www.gluster.org/
[34] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/25/suse_kisses_ceph_goodbye/
[35] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"a low-end home deployment would be happy in less"
For very basic, personal needs - a home NAS with a few users - that's true. You just need the hardware that FreeBSD doesn't complain about. The minimum specs are really for entry-level business systems. They may not help you much if you find issues and run an "unsupported" configuration. Of course if one starts to add jails, VM, plugins, or one does expect very fast performance the hardware matters.
One thing I find "irritating" for a home NAS is that mounting an external USB disks to copy data to (or snapshots) there is unsupported and some "trickery" is required. The regard USB unsuitable for the purpose, although USB 3.x is far faster and better than previous versions for data transfers. Once again a business should implement a better backup process, but for home users making copies on a USB disk is still better than making no copies, and not everybody can run two NAS, or have an always on separate machine to make the copies to an attached disk.
Re: "a low-end home deployment would be happy in less"
It's useful to have a second NAS that can read the primary NAS contents and maintain copies of everything via rsync and configured so that it cannot be seen on the network. So if Ransomware invades the network you can just clean everything and restore the main NAS contents from your "invisible" backup which has maintained a complete private backup.
Re: "a low-end home deployment would be happy in less"
Sure, but not everybody can afford, has space, or simply wish a second NAS and could simply like to copy the NAS contents to separate external disks to be kept offline and offsite so if a ransomware strikes, or another issue, there are copies. I agree this is not a fully resilient solution, but for many people it would still better than no solution and everything just on the NAS.
The reason the USB is not reliable enough looks quite quaint today - for the use outlined above.
Re: "a low-end home deployment would be happy in less"
I agree entirely. My backup routine includes USB drives, one of which is always in my bottom drawer at work in case my house burns down.
That is an entirely sensible thing to do for almost any home user I think.
I've been running TrueNAS in a VM now for a good few years from when it was FreeNAS in fact, with my drives connected to a SAS controller given to the VM through the magic of PCI-E pass-through uses 6x2TB drives in RaidZ2 and its flawlessly reliable.
Giving back to the FLOSS community
"Over the decades, it's employed many notable Unix luminaries..." You can say that again, they currently have one of [1]the key OpenZFS developers (Ryan Moeller, "freqlabs") on the payroll. It's a great way to give back to the community and make sure that all your company's itches are being scratched at the same time. More companies should do that.
[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/graphs/contributors