To the surprise—and likely consternation—of BSD fans everywhere, FreeNAS vendor iXsystems is building a new version of its core product, TrueNAS, on top of Debian Linux.

This week's TrueNAS Scale announcement builds on the company's March announcement that its commercial project TrueNAS and its community project FreeNAS would be merging into a common base.

Effectively, all the NAS projects from iXsystems will be TrueNAS variants moving forward, with the free-to-use version being TrueNAS Core, the new Debian-based project becoming TrueNAS Scale, and the commercial project remaining simply TrueNAS.

The company is still being coy about the overall goals of the new project, with the major clue being that "SCALE" is used as an acronym.

Compared with other TrueNAS editions:.

TrueNAS CORE: Single node with SAS expansion.

We're already looking forward to the new unified TrueNAS Core approaching release status; we've tested engineering dailies and believe that we're already seeing the codebase unification between TrueNAS and what was FreeNAS resulting in better QA and attention to detail on the user interface

The stated enterprise goals for TrueNAS Scale are very interesting—but we also believe many community users may be enticed by the idea of a simple, attractive Web interface to ZFS atop a Linux base rather than BSD

Interested admins and developers can peruse the repositories for the TrueNAS Scale project, which is being developed openly atop Debian 11