iXsystems, Inc. is a privately owned American computer technology company based in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

that develops, sells and supports computing and storage products and services. Its principal products are customized

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

distributions, including the discontinued

desktop operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

TrueOS TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD or PCBSD) is a discontinued Unix-like, server-oriented operating system built upon the most recent releases of FreeBSD-CURRENT. Up to 2018 it aimed to be easy to install by using a graphical installation program, and ea ...

(formerly PC-BSD), the FreeBSD based

file server In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by the workstations that are ab ...

s and

network attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the techn ...

systems TrueNAS Core (previously FreeNAS) and TrueNAS Enterprise, and the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

based TrueNAS SCALE. It also markets hardware platforms for these products, and develops enterprise-scale storage architectures and converged infrastructures. As part of its activities, the company has strong ties to the

community, has repeatedly donated hardware and support to fledgling projects within the BSD community, and sponsors and develops development within FreeBSD, as well as being a sponsor and attendee of

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

community events.

History

iXsystems was founded in 1991 as

Berkeley Software Design Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI or, later, BSDi), was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS (originally known as BSD/386), a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for P ...

, Inc. (BSDI, later BSDi) by Rick Adams and members of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

Computer Systems Research Group The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. History Professor Bo ...

(CSRG), including Keith Bostic,

Kirk McKusick Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 ...

Mike Karels Michael J. (Mike) Karels is an American Software Engineer and one of the key people in history of BSD UNIX. A graduate of University of Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology. Mike went on to University of California, Berkeley for ...

, Bill Jolitz and Donn Seeley. In the year 2000, Berkeley Software Design, Inc. acquired enterprise server manufacturer Telenet System Solutions, Inc., which was founded in 1996 and operated from the same San Jose, California office and manufacturing facility that iXsystems operates today. In 2001, BSDi sold its operating systems business to

Wind River Systems Wind River Systems, also known as Wind River (trademarked as Wndrvr), is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems software, ...

and spun off its hardware business and iXtreme line of servers as iXsystems, Inc. In 2002, OffMyServer, Inc., owned by two BSDi employees, acquired iXsystems, Inc. and operated it as OffMyServer, Inc. until restoring the iXsystems name in 2005. In 2006, iXsystems adopted the PC-BSD project and hired its founder, Kris Moore. In 2007, iXsystems acquired FreeBSD Mall, Inc., reuniting all the portions of the original BSDi that had been spun off to

. In 2009, iXsystems negotiated to continue the

FreeNAS TrueNAS is the branding for a range of free and open-source network-attached storage (NAS) operating systems produced by iXsystems, and based on FreeBSD and Linux, using the OpenZFS file system. It is licensed under the terms of the BSD Li ...

project when its developers decided to move it to

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

. iXsystems introduced a comprehensive rewrite of FreeNAS in 2011 which now provides the platform for the "FreeNAS Mini" SMB NAS arrays and "TrueNAS" enterprise storage arrays. In August 2010, BSD author

Dru Lavigne Dru Lavigne is a network and systems administrator, IT instructor, technical writer and director at FreeBSD Foundation. She has been using FreeBSD since 1996, has authored several BSD books, and spent over 10 years developing training material ...

joined iXsystems and in July 2013, Jordan K. Hubbard, one of the founders of the FreeBSD project, joined iXsystems as CTO.

Products and services

Servers

iXsystems designs, sells and supports custom

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

servers for workgroups through data centers with a focus on support for the

operating system. All iXsystems servers are subjected to a three-day burn-in process to reduce returns and are available with

as an alternative operating system.

TrueNAS

TrueNAS TrueNAS is the branding for a range of free and open-source network-attached storage (NAS) operating systems produced by iXsystems, and based on FreeBSD and Linux, using the OpenZFS file system. It is licensed under the terms of the BSD Lice ...

is the brand for ixSystems' open source

platform. It includes: :* TrueNAS CORE (previously FreeNAS) - a free file server and expandable platform based on FreeBSD :* TrueNAS Enterprise - an enterprise file server for commercial use, also based on FreeBSD :* TrueNAS SCALE - a

based hyperconverged version of the TrueNAS platform. :* TrueNAS branded hardware - enterprise storage arrays, a

network-attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...

(NAS) systems,

storage area network A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from serve ...

(SAN) devices, and

High Availability High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period. Modernization has resulted in an increased reliance on these systems. Fo ...

systems, with up to 10 petabytes raw capacity. The FreeNAS project was originally launched by third party developers in October 2005 and aimed to create an

system based on FreeBSD 6.0. In September 2009, the development team concluded that the project, then at release 0.7, required a complete rewrite to accommodate modern features such as a plug-in architecture, and the project gradually forked, with a new version based on

, and the existing version being transferred to iXsystems, who rewrote it with a new architecture based on

8.1, releasing FreeNAS 8 Beta in November 2010. On November 19, 2010, iXsystems released FreeNAS 8 Beta, its first release of the popular

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

software-defined storage Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storag ...

project that it adopted and rewrote. FreeNAS is based on the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

and the

OpenZFS OpenZFS is a free and open-source storage platform licensed under CDDL that encompasses the functionality of traditional filesystems and logical volume manager. It includes protection against data corruption, support for high storage capaciti ...

file system. On August 3, 2011, iXsystems introduced the ''TrueNAS'' line of enterprise storage arrays, a

(NAS) system and

(SAN) device that supports the SMB, AFP, NFS,

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on ...

rsync rsync is a utility for efficiently transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers by comparing the modification times and sizes of files. It is commonly found on Unix-like operat ...

and FTP/TFTP sharing protocols over

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

and

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data cen ...

network fabrics. TrueNAS also supports vendor-certified protocols including VMware VAAI, Microsoft CSV, ODX, and VSS, and Veeam. A custom, tool-less enclosure provides TrueNAS High Availability using dual controllers, and four user-serviceable components: disks, power supplies, fans and the controllers themselves. TrueNAS uses the

file system in

hybrid Hybrid may refer to: Science * Hybrid (biology), an offspring resulting from cross-breeding ** Hybrid grape, grape varieties produced by cross-breeding two ''Vitis'' species ** Hybridity, the property of a hybrid plant which is a union of two dif ...

and

all-flash ''All-Flash'', originally published as ''All-Flash Quarterly'', was a comic book magazine series published by All-American Publications and later National Periodicals (DC Comics) featuring superhero Jay Garrick, the original Flash. The series was t ...

configurations up to 10 petabytes in raw capacity. On March 15, 2020, iXsystems announced the merging of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified product with two editions. ''TrueNAS CORE'' would be the

rebranded Rebranding is a marketing strategy in which a new name, term, symbol, design, concept or combination thereof is created for an established brand with the intention of developing a new, differentiated identity in the minds of consumers, investors ...

continuation of FreeNAS, as a free, open-source option, and ''TrueNAS Enterprise'' would continue as a paid, closed-source option with additional enterprise-focused features. Additionally a

port of TrueNAS was under development, to be known as TrueNAS SCALE.

FreeNAS Certified

The iXsystems ''FreeNAS Certified'' line of

small and medium-sized enterprise Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are businesses whose personnel and revenue numbers fall below certain limits. The abbreviation "SME" is used by international organizations such as the World Bank ...

storage arrays are designed to run the FreeNAS storage operating system and are available in 1U, 2U and 4U configurations.

TrueNAS Mini and Mini XL

The iXsystems ''TrueNAS Mini'' line of

SOHO Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was develop ...

storage arrays are designed to run the TrueNAS storage operating system and are available in 4 bay and 8 bay configurations.

References

External links

Official website

TrueNAS website
{{Berkeley Software Distribution 1991 establishments in California Berkeley Software Distribution American companies established in 1991 Free software companies Software companies established in 1991