Kubernetes clusters need storage, and that storage needs to work — automatically, reliably, and at scale. With the release of TrueNAS 25.10, we’ve rebuilt our Kubernetes integration from the ground up and earned Red Hat OpenShift certification in the process.

If your organization runs Kubernetes or OpenShift, you now have a certified, enterprise-grade storage backend that you control.

Why This Matters

Red Hat OpenShift certification is more than a rubber stamp. It means the TrueNAS CSI driver has been tested, packaged, and approved to Red Hat’s standards. It’s available directly from the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog as the TrueNAS CSI Operator, and it works with OpenShift 4.20 and later.

This matters for procurement, for compliance, and for the teams who have to support these environments long-term. Certified means supported.

What Changed in 25.10

The previous Kubernetes integration relied on the third-party “democratic-csi” driver that mixed TrueNAS API calls with legacy SSH sessions to manage storage. It worked, but it was difficult to secure, harder to maintain, and challenging to support for both clients and the TrueNAS team.

So we replaced it entirely.

The new TrueNAS CSI driver is a first-party, API-only implementation, backed by the versioned TrueNAS API introduced with TrueNAS 25.10 that carries forward compatibility when you upgrade. Storage provisioning, resizing, snapshots, and deletion are all handled automatically in response to what applications declare they need. Administrators don’t have to babysit it.

Matching Storage to Your Workloads

Not every workload has the same profile, and TrueNAS doesn’t pretend otherwise. Organizations can tier storage across systems based on what each workload actually needs:

• Use high-performance TrueNAS V-Series or F-Series all-NVMe systems for performance-critical workloads like databases, real-time analytics, and AI inference
• Leverage the M-Series or V-Series in hybrid storage mode, for high-capacity archival and throughput workloads with up to 40PB of capacity

Kubernetes handles workload assignment to storage tiers automatically. You define the policy once; K8s enforces it.

Storage You Control

OpenShift certification demonstrates the TrueNAS team’s commitment to giving enterprise Kubernetes admins full control of their storage. TrueNAS receiving OpenShift certification matters for another reason beyond technical validation: it’s a direct check on vendor dependency. With TrueNAS, your storage infrastructure isn’t held by a cloud provider’s billing department or subject to a platform vendor’s pricing decisions. Your data lives where you put it, and it moves when you decide — not when a renewal contract forces your hand.

For organizations that have been burned by cloud egress fees or vendor lock-in, a certified on-premises storage platform running TrueNAS with OpenZFS is more than a technical choice; it’s a smart business decision.

The Bottom Line

More than 60% of Fortune 500 companies already run TrueNAS. OpenShift certification means that list now explicitly includes organizations running Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes stack — with a supported, certified path that IT leaders can put in front of procurement without apology.

Download TrueNAS Community Edition to see it in action, or talk to our team about enterprise deployment.