iXsystems says unified TrueNAS open storage software almost here

The latest version of the TrueNAS open source storage software from iXsystems will soon be available, according to the company’s latest update notes.

The release is called TrueNAS Fangtooth, and promises to improve performance, security, and scalability for both users and developers. Fangtooth is the successor to TrueNAS Electric Eel.

Fangtooth is based on TrueNAS SCALE, and marketed as the common TrueNAS Community Edition. TrueNAS Fangtooth will be an upgrade for both SCALE 24.10 and CORE 13.x users, and introduces new features for Community and Enterprise users.

The more mature CORE was seen as delivering better performance than SCALE, and it needs less CPU power and memory. TrueNAS CORE is the original successor of FreeNAS, based on the FreeBSD operating system. With the introduction of TrueNAS SCALE in 2022, more modern Linux capabilities were introduced to TrueNAS, enabling adoption by a much larger community.

SCALE was initially created as a fork of CORE, with each version continuing their development, bug fixes, and security updates independently.

But by the back end of last year, there were roughly equal numbers of SCALE and CORE users, with SCALE having doubled its system count over the year, and CORE “declining slowly” as users migrated to SCALE, said iXsystems.

“The benefits of unification will be enormous for the community, both users and developers. Before the end of 2025, we expect most TrueNAS users will be on Fangtooth,” the supplier said.

Fangtooth (aka TrueNAS 25.04) is already available for developers, and the BETA1 version is expected to be ready by February 11. Bug fixes, feature updates, and “ongoing polishing” will continue until the targeted release date for a “stable” community version on April 15.

Notable new capabilities in Fangtooth include TrueNAS Versioned API, which allows third parties to use APIs to control TrueNAS, knowing that future versions of TrueNAS will honor the same API schemas.

“TrueNAS can evolve and improve in a more organized manner,” said iXsystems, “allowing external tools to run with longer stability.” Future versions of TrueCommand are expected to enhance system longevity. User-Linked API Tokens are also included to provide secure and restricted management.

In addition, Fast Dedup promises a “significant reduction” in storage media costs, and iSCSI Block Cloning allows virtualization solutions to benefit from using iSCSI XCOPY commands for efficient and rapid data copying.

There is also upgraded containerization and virtualization, with TrueNAS integrating Incus support, and an upgraded WebUI with support for native LXC containers.

Also, by upgrading to Linux kernel 6.12 LTS, Fangtooth will support new hardware. This will be an advantage for both CORE and SCALE users upgrading their hardware.

Apps in Electric Eel use TrueNAS’s host IP address. Fangtooth enables IP alias addresses to be created and assigned to one or more apps. A number of other new features can be viewed here.

By July, it is expected that Fangtooth will be recommended to enterprise users.