beyond proxmox —

TrueNAS R-series hyperconverged appliances blend storage and compute

The new hardware and software greatly expand TrueNAS' capabilities.

There's a lot to unpack in this infographic, which serves as a pretty concise description of what TrueNAS SCALE is and does—or will do, when it's completely finished.
Enlarge / There's a lot to unpack in this infographic, which serves as a pretty concise description of what TrueNAS SCALE is and does—or will do, when it's completely finished.

Today, storage vendor iXsystems is launching a new R-series hyperconverged infrastructure appliance for its TrueNAS product line—and the first alpha release of TrueNAS SCALE, a Debian Linux-based version of the TrueNAS storage distribution.

The new R-series appliances are designed to run either traditional, FreeBSD-based TrueNAS, or the new Debian-based TrueNAS SCALE. The series launches with four models—all rack-mounted—ranging from the 1U, 16-bay TrueNAS R10 to the up to 12U, 52 bay TrueNAS R50. All four models offer Ethernet connectivity up to dual 100GbE, as well as optional dual 32Gb Fibre Channel and Intel Xeon CPUs. The three larger models are expandable via separate JBOD shelves as well.

TrueNAS itself is an OpenZFS-based storage distribution, which can be purchased preinstalled on NAS hardware or installed by users on their own generic PC equipment. It offers users the rich feature set of the ZFS filesystem—including block-level checksums and data healing, advanced storage topologies, atomic COW snapshots, rapid asymmetric replication, and more—along with a broad range of network sharing protocols, including SMB, NFS, sFTP, and iSCSI.

Ars has been covering TrueNAS—formerly FreeNAS—off and on since 2011. In those nine plus years, it has been a FreeBSD-based distribution, and while it offered some limited compute functionality—based on FreeBSD jails, which were a mature solution before Linux containers were so much as a gleam in anyone's eye—it focused primarily on simple storage.

The first public alpha of TrueNAS SCALE is available now, alongside the new R-series hardware. TrueNAS SCALE changes both the base operating system and overall goal of the original TrueNAS.

TrueNAS SCALE is based on Debian Linux in order to provide Docker-friendly Linux containerization and more industry-standard virtualization than FreeBSD can. It also shifts the distribution's focus from pure storage to a blended, hyperconverged environment, in which launching and maintaining containers and virtual machines are as well-integrated as managing the storage beneath them.

As of today, iXsystems describes the TrueNAS SCALE alpha as having SMB (Windows filesharing), NFS, and iSCSI working well, with the Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) hypervisor well-integrated. Kubernetes, along with the scale-out functionality allowing management and distribution of containers across an entire farm of SCALE appliances, is present but still only in raw API form, with a user interface expected in a forthcoming beta release in December.

We plan to review TrueNAS SCALE here in late November, as the project gets closer to its next release.

Listing image by iXsystems / Ars Technica

Channel Ars Technica