iXsystems Announces TrueNAS SCALE As A Linux-Based Offering

While iXsystems has been known as one of the leading FreeBSD-focused vendors with their various BSD-powered storage devices and servers as well as contributing significantly to upstream FreeBSD in addition to their former work on TrueOS/PC-BSD, they are now developing a new platform called TrueNAS SCALE that is based on Linux.

Back in March was the announcement of FreeNAS and TrueNAS unifying as the two FreeBSD-based NAS-focused software offerings from iXsystems. TrueNAS 12.0 is coming together while iXsystems also officially ended work on their TrueOS operating system (nee PC-BSD), formerly the best desktop BSD operating system. Now adding another twist into their software work this year is the announcement of TrueNAS SCALE.

TrueNAS SCALE is focused on scale-out, converged, active-active, Linux containers, and easy-to-manage infrastructure. But rather than TrueNAS SCALE being based on FreeBSD like the rest of their offerings, this platform is based on Debian Linux.

TrueNAS SCALE will be reusing much of the existing iXsystems tooling built up for TrueNAS, but at the heart is Debian GNU/Linux 11. TrueNAS SCALE will continue to promote the ZFS file-system via OpenZFS (ZFS On Linux) usage.

More details on TrueNAS SCALE can be found via the announcement via Kris Moore, the VP of Engineering at iXsystems. Quite a strange twist to see iXsystems offering a Linux-based platform given their nearly three decades focused on BSD solutions.