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An introduction to FreeNAS

Open Space

In 2005, after an inordinate struggle to set up his own home networked file storage, Olivier Cochard-Labbé decided to create a solution to streamline the process. Much coding and configuring ensued, and he spawned FreeNAS – Free, as in freely available (open source) and based on FreeBSD, and NAS, as in Network Attached Storage.

Before long, a vibrant community formed around the project, and FreeNAS [1] began to take shape as an actual product. It came to include a range of services, from file sharing to media streaming.

By 2010, however, Cochard-Labbé was no longer able to commit sufficient time and resources to keep the FreeNAS project going, so he transferred control of it to iXsystems [2], a company well-known for its support of open source software in general and FreeBSD [3] in particular. A period of considerable development effort followed, which involved updating and modernizing the software and improving the project infrastructure to meet the needs of a growing FreeNAS development community.

The user interface was completely reimplemented, and features like disk encryption for ZFS pools and a third-party plugin system to support the installation of non-core services were added. Today, FreeNAS is under very active development, with hundreds of thousands of downloads for each release – more than 5.5 million in total since its inception.

Although FreeNAS was designed for home and small office environments, it does have a true business-class counterpart: TrueNAS [4]. Based on FreeNAS, TrueNAS is an enterprise-grade unified storage appliance also created by iXsystems, designed with the mission-critical IT environment in mind. TrueNAS adds enterprise features like hardware failover, performance tuning, reporting, 24/7

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