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. Considering the extent of the changes needed Theile proposed migrating the project to
Debian Linux, however, Cochard-Labbé preferred FreeNAS to remain on FreeBSD, resulting in Theile agreeing to fork FreeNAS and ultimately creating
OpenMediaVault. FreeNAS would remain on FreeBSD with development taken over by
iXsystems, a company founded by original
Berkeley Software Design developers whose company supported the PC-BSD OS 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 their enterprise hardware appliances and proprietary OS 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 2022, iXsystems released TrueNAS Scale, a Debian Linux port of the TrueNAS OS. The "Scale" moniker was intended to be an homage to the
scale-out storage capabilities of the Linux based
Gluster File System and
Kubernetes based containerized app system. However, both Gluster and Kubernetes would be 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/security updates going forward with no further feature development. In January of 2025, iXsystems announced that the Scale offering had reached full feature and performance parity with Core. As such, they 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 the mid-late 2025. In 2025, to avoid confusion between the company and the product, iXSystems began doing business directly as TrueNas. This included an updated website in alignment with this change, and new company branding. == Recommended versions ==