I’m excited to announce the release of version 9.3 of our TrueNAS Storage Appliance software. Simply put, this is the best release in our enterprise storage line yet.

The first thing you’ll notice is a simplified and redesigned Web UI. We’ve removed the interface tabs and placed more common options first. The top and tree menus all perform the same functions now and are merely both still there to allow choice of preference. These UI enhancements were brought over from FreeNAS, giving TrueNAS the familiar look and feel as FreeNAS 9.3, released in December. Several other features have also been brought over from FreeNAS 9.3 including a new configuration setup wizard and a new and more secure update manager that provides the ability to perform updates without rebooting the system.

The system level improvements are what we’re really excited about, however: NFSv4 support, block level VMware VAAI support (7 primitives), VMware snapshot coordination, the ability to encrypt High Availability ZFS pools, new Directory Services and WebDAV, and many other performance enhancements too numerous to list here.

TrueNAS 9.3 now also supports Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 Clustering, allowing for frictionless integration with all versions of Windows Server. Every TrueNAS appliance is Certified for Windows Server 2012 R2, VMware Ready, and Citrix Ready.

TrueNAS is the enterprise appliance version of FreeNAS (for a list of differences between FreeNAS and TrueNAS, check out this article I wrote recently covering it). We don’t release TrueNAS at the same time as FreeNAS. There’s a very good reason for this—our QA leverages contributions from the FreeNAS open source community. We use input from the FreeNAS Beta and Release cycles to improve the quality and stability of TrueNAS by only merging stable, tested code into our own internal QA lab. No other company has a testing environment like we do—our beta testers number in the thousands and they use FreeNAS in multiple scenarios. This process allows us to iterate and improve TrueNAS faster than any other commercial storage product in the market.

For more information on TrueNAS 9.3, see our press release or view the video. I am very proud of the TrueNAS 9.3 release. I would like to thank our Production, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing teams at iXsystems for their tireless commitment to this update. Most of all I would like to thank you, the users, as without you we could not have made TrueNAS 9.3 the best release in our enterprise storage line.

Brett Davis
iXsystems Executive Vice President