TrueNAS is a family of network-attached storage (NAS) operating systems and storage appliances developed by iXsystems Inc. (which began doing business as TrueNAS in 2025). The product line consists of TrueNAS Enterprise, a commercial line of fully integrated storage appliances sold with enterprise support, and TrueNAS Community Edition, a free operating system that can be installed on commodity x86-64 hardware. The operating systems include components released under proprietary, GPL, and BSD licenses.
Built around the OpenZFS file system, TrueNAS provides a range of built-in file and block-storage services, a Docker-based app store, container support, and a virtual machine hypervisor for hosting additional services.
History
The TrueNAS project originated as FreeNAS, created by Olivier Cochard-Labbé in October 2005, based on the m0n0wall firewall and FreeBSD 6.0. Volker Theile joined the project in 2006 and later assumed its leadership.
In 2009, Theile concluded that FreeNAS required substantial rewrites to remain relevant and proposed migrating the project to Debian Linux. However, Cochard-Labbé preferred FreeNAS to remain on FreeBSD, leading Theile to fork FreeNAS and create OpenMediaVault. FreeNAS remained on FreeBSD, with development taken over by iXsystems, a company founded by original Berkeley Software Design developers that also supported the PC-BSD operating system and sold a line of storage servers.
FreeNAS 8.x was released in 2010 following a substantial rewrite of the front and back end, and it integrated the OpenZFS file system. iXsystems also introduced the "TrueNAS" branding for its enterprise hardware appliances and proprietary operating system based on FreeNAS, adding enterprise-centric features such as high availability and Fibre Channel support.
In July 2020, iXsystems announced TrueNAS Scale, a "scale-out" Linux-based project based on TrueNAS Core. In 2021, iXsystems merged the commercial and free operating systems into a single codebase under the TrueNAS branding, renaming the feature-limited free community edition TrueNAS Core to distinguish it from TrueNAS Enterprise.
In 2022, iXsystems released TrueNAS Scale, a Debian Linux port of the TrueNAS operating system. The "Scale" moniker was intended as an homage to the scale-out storage capabilities of the Linux-based Gluster File System and the Kubernetes-based containerized app system, though both Gluster and Kubernetes were deprecated shortly thereafter.
At the end of 2023, citing higher adoption rates of the Linux-based TrueNAS Scale, iXsystems announced that the FreeBSD-based TrueNAS Core would only receive maintenance and security updates going forward, with no further feature development.
In January 2025, iXsystems announced that the Scale offering had reached full feature and performance parity with Core. The company announced that Scale would be renamed TrueNAS, available as the free "Community Edition" (CE) and the paid Enterprise edition, with all future development going into the Linux-based branch. The announcement recommended that all users of Scale and Core upgrade to the unified version 25.04 "Fangtooth" by mid-to-late 2025.
In 2025, to avoid confusion between the company and the product, iXsystems began doing business directly as TrueNAS, including an updated website and new company branding.
Technical details
TrueNAS runs on the Debian Linux operating system and targets the x86-64 platform. The stable release as of mid-2026 is version 25.10.4, released on June 3, 2026. The software is distributed under GPL-3.0 and proprietary licenses, with its source repository hosted on GitHub.
Editions
- TrueNAS Enterprise: A commercial product line of storage appliances with fully integrated software and hardware, sold with enterprise support. It includes features such as high availability and Fibre Channel support.
- TrueNAS Community Edition: A free, open-source operating system installable on commodity x86-64 hardware, providing file, block, and object storage in a unified interface.
References
- Wikipedia: "TrueNAS" (accessed via encyclopedic sources)
- TrueNAS official website: truenas.com
