The Fangtooth is a deep sea fish with two outsized teeth, the largest of any ocean fish in proportion to their body. It’s also the code name for the next version of TrueNAS, the successor to the very successful TrueNAS Electric Eel.

For TrueNAS, the two teeth of the Fangtooth fish represent CORE and SCALE, combining together with the goal of unifying both CORE and SCALE versions into the common TrueNAS Community Edition (CE). TrueNAS “Fangtooth” will be an upgrade for both SCALE 24.10 and CORE 13.x users, introducing new features for both Community and Enterprise users.

TrueNAS Fangtooth (aka TrueNAS 25.04) nightly images are available for developers, and the BETA1 version is expected to be ready in February. Bug fixes, feature updates, and ongoing polishing will continue until the targeted release date in April 2025.

Where TrueNAS Began Its Swim

TrueNAS CORE is the original successor of FreeNAS based on the FreeBSD Operating System. With the introduction of TrueNAS SCALE in 2022, modern Linux capabilities were introduced to TrueNAS, enabling adoption by a much larger and still rapidly growing community.

We were realistic that SCALE would not be as mature and polished as CORE for many software versions, so SCALE was initially created as a fork of CORE, with each version continuing their development, bug fixes and security updates independently. CORE 13.x has been in sustaining mode for the last 18 months and received its latest major update in November, to reach 13.0-U6.

Achieving Parity and Building Upon Success

As of October 2024, roughly equal numbers of SCALE and CORE users exist. SCALE is continuing to grow at a rapid rate, having doubled in system count over the past year, and CORE is declining slowly as users migrate to SCALE.

TrueNAS 24.04 “Dragonfish” achieved parity in storage quality with 13.x, and 24.10 “Electric Eel” added a better Apps infrastructure based on Docker while retaining all the storage quality benefits. With OpenZFS features such as RAIDZ expansion and improved performance, 24.10 is now superior in many dimensions to 13.x and has the most users of any release. We expect TrueNAS SCALE 24.10.1 will see even higher adoption among Enterprise users.

However, there are a few capabilities (discussed later) in CORE that Electric Eel does not provide. Fangtooth addresses these issues and enables it to be the upgrade path for both CORE and SCALE users alike. Fangtooth is the new, unified Community Edition.

The benefits of re-unification will be enormous for the community, both users and developers. Before the end of 2025, we expect the following to be true:

Most TrueNAS users will be on Fangtooth. The community experience will be streamlined, benefiting users by allowing them to share a common software base.

New features and security patches will be on a single, unified TrueNAS version, simplifying the process for users and developers. Features, APIs, and UIs will not diverge. Engineering, quality assurance, and support resources will ensure that the common version meets all users’ functional and stability needs.

The TrueNAS community will be larger, and satisfaction with the software and documentation will be higher. The TrueNAS business will also get stronger with increased resources and accelerated new features.

Fangtooth Bridges the Feature Gap

Fangtooth not only unifies CORE and SCALE, but also introduces a variety of new features to TrueNAS that improve performance, security, and scalability for both users and developers. The most notable of these new capabilities are:

TrueNAS Versioned API:  This allows third parties to use APIs to control TrueNAS, knowing that future versions of TrueNAS will honor the same API schemas. TrueNAS can evolve and improve in a more organized manner, allowing external tools to run with longer stability. Future versions of TrueCommand can more easily maintain better system longevity. User-Linked API Tokens are also included to provide secure and restricted management.

Fast Dedup: This feature is experimental in Electric Eel and is undergoing additional testing to be ready for production use. The significant reduction in storage media costs can benefit many use cases.

iSCSI Block Cloning:  Virtualization solutions can benefit from using iSCSI XCOPY commands to efficiently and rapidly copy data.

Upgraded Containerization & Virtualization: TrueNAS further improves its virtualization capabilities with the integration of Incus support, and an upgraded WebUI with support for native LXC containers.

Upgraded Linux Kernel: By upgrading to Linux kernel 6.12 LTS, Fangtooth will have updated support for new hardware. This will be an advantage for both CORE and SCALE users upgrading their hardware.

Apps with Configurable IP addresses: Apps in Electric Eel use TrueNAS’s host IP address. Fangtooth enables IP alias addresses to be created and assigned to one or more Apps.

Fangtooth bridges the gap between CORE and SCALE by bringing features new to SCALE users, but equivalent to CORE 13.x features.

LXC Containers:  LXC is the next generation of Linux Sandbox and a natural evolution for those coming from FreeBSD Jails. These will also be managed via Incus and provide  a consistent UI for LXC and  traditional VMs. Like Jails, there is efficient use of RAM and the ability to allocate a separate IP address. Within an LXC, there can be a full Linux instance and a Docker/Kubernetes engine. Tools like Dockge and Portainer can be used. You can see an early demonstration of the Incus management in TrueNAS on the TrueNAS Tech Talk (T3) Podcast – Episode 8

Fangtooth takes TrueNAS Enterprise appliances to the next level with features enabling Enterprises to build more secure, scalable, and performant solutions:

Improved Security (STIG): Additional work on logging and auditing will take TrueNAS to the next level in government security compliance and robustness.

NFS over RDMA: The performance needs of applications increase with data size, compute speed, and cluster size. NFS over RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) increases bandwidth and CPU efficiency on clients and the TrueNAS systems.

Veeam Fast Clone: Veeam data movers can use SMB COPY commands to accelerate specific actions and improve general performance. TrueNAS is working with Veeam to better integrate solutions for Enterprise users.

Fibre Channel: FC storage has been supported on Enterprise 13.x for over 5 years, and with its addition to Fangtooth, Enterprise users not only have a migration and upgrade path, but existing customers searching for Fibre Channel storage for their existing SAN will be able to choose from our full line of solutions, including the powerful TrueNAS F-Series.  The same LUNs can be accessed via FC or iSCSI and backed up through True Cloud backup.

Systems upgraded from CORE to Fangtooth will also be more secure and perform better. Most users prefer the modernized UI and the addition of the global UI search capability. More information on Fangtooth will be made available prior to the BETA.

When Should I Migrate?

If you are deploying a new TrueNAS system, we recommend TrueNAS SCALE 24.10 for added functionality, vastly broader hardware support, an expanded App catalog, better performance on most workloads, and an improved Web UI, all of which make managing TrueNAS easier than ever.

TrueNAS 13.0 users looking for the new capabilities outlined above can upgrade to TrueNAS 24.10 at any time, preserving data and essential NAS functionality such as SMB, NFS, iSCSI, and VMs – the primary exception being Jails. Jails can be manually migrated to 24.10 using Linux Sandboxes and either Dockge or Portainer. For those interested in the full set of unified features, Fangtooth will provide even better tools (e.g., LXC) for Jail-like functionality while avoiding the security concerns of iocage.

Fangtooth is completing an internal ALPHA and is available as a Nightly image for development and testing. We anticipate that Fangtooth BETA testing will start in February, and the Fangtooth RELEASE version in April would be the earliest for any significant upgrades.  By July 2025, we expect Fangtooth to be recommended to Enterprise users.

For current software recommendations, always review the Software Status page for recommendations based on your profile.

Join the TrueNAS Community

Whether you’re interested in deploying the existing TrueNAS 24.10 or helping shape the future of TrueNAS 25.04, there’s never been a better time to join the growing TrueNAS community. Download your copy of TrueNAS Community Edition today and join the thousands of users experiencing True Data Freedom. Share your experience on the newly relaunched TrueNAS Community Forums or find us on social media!