With the release of TrueNAS SCALE 22.12 (Bluefin), the open hyperconvergence and scale-out storage platform is ideal for supporting enterprise file, block, and object storage while also supporting the deployment of applications and virtual machines (VMs). The freely downloadable software is now generally available after four months of testing two beta versions and a release candidate. Software quality is assured following more than 2,000 users who tested the release candidate version of Bluefin.

The first release of TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 (Angelfish) successfully introduced a Linux OS foundation, OpenZFS file system, containers (Kubernetes and Docker), and clustering to TrueNAS storage environments, enabling over 40,000 deployed systems in only 10 months. Bluefin will build on this solid foundation and expand to many more use cases and environments. Based on current trends, the IXsystems team expects the software to pass 100,000 installations and 2 Exabytes of data under management in 2023. Bluefin is a simple update for Angelfish users, offering new features, higher quality, and many improvements. 

Bluefin provides a wide range of new capabilities that will go through the normal software life cycle to maturity. Some significant feature updates in TrueNAS SCALE 22.12 include:

  • FIPS-140 Security - Provides restricted administration privileges to non-root users, role-based access control, and verified crypto modules. 
  • Kubernetes CSI Driver - Kubernetes clusters can use TrueNAS SCALE as the storage cluster. TrueNAS SCALE can support Kubernetes CSI, VMware ESXi, and OpenStack Cinder, as well as provide clustered file and object storage services.
  • Cluster Management - Includes some new APIs to reduce downtime and operational risks when replacing a Gluster node in a cluster.
  • Docker OverlayFS - OverlayFS support within OpenZFS reduces overhead when running containerized workloads.  
  • Virtualization Improvements - USB device pass-through and CPU pinning are enabled, in addition to the existing pass-through across PCIe devices, including GPUs.
  • GPU Acceleration - A newer generation of GPUs (Intel Alderlake, NVIDIA GeForce-30xx) are now supported for sharing with application workloads.
  • iX-Storj service - Globally distributed storage with Web 3.0 technology is a game changer for cloud storage reliability, costs, and performance.
  • Enterprise Support - TrueNAS SCALE inherits all the high-availability and support tools of TrueNAS Enterprise as a separate license with up to 24x365 support.

Built on Debian Linux, the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE supports SMB and NFS File Sharing, iSCSI Block Storage, S3 Object API integration, and Cloud Sync for interoperability with public cloud storage. It also offers unique flexibility as hyperconverged infrastructure that allows scaling of compute and storage independently. TrueNAS SCALE can be installed and run on a single node or across 100 clustered nodes, making the massively scalable infrastructure software ideal for a wide range of use cases and applications.

TrueNAS R30 NVMe All-Flash

Also available with Bluefin is TrueNAS R30, which offers 16 NVMe Gen4 SSDs per system and two dual-port 100GbE NICs in a 1U package, and each node is capable of over 30 GB/s bandwidth. It’s yypically configured with 32 cores, 256 GB of RAM, and up to 240TB of NVMe Flash. When configured in TrueNAS SCALE clusters, the R30 scales aggregate bandwidth to hundreds of Gb/s for clustered file and object workloads and is ideal for the most demanding analytics and video editing environments.