iXsystems Unveiled FreeNAS Corral Software

iXsystems, Inc. launched FreeNAS 10 and unveiled the FreeNAS Corral brand.

FreeNAS Corral Dashboard
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With FreeNAS Corral (formerly FreeNAS 10), the company introduces the next generation of open source software-defined storage software. Itl extends FreeNAS’ enterprise-grade storage capabilities by adding VM and Docker container management. It enables the integration of software-defined storage into VMs and provides persistent storage for Docker containers. These enhancements are provided through a re-designed GUI and a command line interface (CLI), making FreeNAS both to use and more capable. The Corral name represents what this release does best: corralling data, VMs, containers, and storage services under one management interface.

In addition to the new name for FreeNAS 10, the firm introduced the new FreeNAS Corral logo and logomark.

“FreeNAS Corral catapults the world’s most popular storage OS into a new category by combining FreeNAS’ renowned storage services with Docker containers and full-machine virtualization capabilities. We’re now enabling users and developers to build hyper-converged solutions to support their web-scale applications,” said Brett Davis, EVP, iXsystems. “The Corral name represents the next generation in enterprise-grade services contributed by iXsystems to the Open Source community. Only a new name could do justice to such a giant evolutionary step.“

FreeNAS Corral introduces an intuitive GUI, a scriptable command line interface, and a websocket API that can automate and control every aspect of the FreeNAS Corral software. It also includes the bhyve hypervisor for virtualization and Docker container services. It includes easy to use VM templates, which provide set up, pre-installed versions of multiple guest OSs including TrueOS, FreeBSD, SmartOS, and several GNU/Linux distributions, including CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. VMs can also be created for a variety of Windows environments using user-provided installation media.

Rather than using the cloud to develop, test, and deploy applications, FreeNAS Corral, with its storage, VM, and container services, can be easily used instead.

When it comes to storage, early users found provisioning storage with FreeNAS Corral to be more intuitive and accomplished in a shorter amount of time than with previous versions of FreeNAS. They also found that FreeNAS Corral’s VM and Docker container support enabled them to easily host their application solutions while using FreeNAS Corral’s storage services. It supports Docker containers from dockerhub, enabling DevOps teams to manage, deploy, and scale trusted and business-ready applications across FreeNAS Corral instances cooperatively with the cloud.

Create-a-volume
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“Thousands of early FreeNAS 10 testers have already seen and deployed many of the revolutionary enhancements that FreeNAS Corral is delivering. This release of FreeNAS Corral gives even more users the opportunity to see all the revolutionary enhancements that continue to make FreeNAS the world’s leading Open Source storage system. It provides all the features of FreeNAS while remaining 100% Open Source, also fully leveraging other open source infrastructures like GitHub and Docker Hub,” said Jordan Hubbard, CTO, iXsystems and head of FreeNAS Corral project. “We look forward to continued collaboration with the Open Source development community!“

FreeNAS Corral is a ground-up rewrite of FreeNAS that allows for future innovation in the product, while supporting all the storage features of FreeNAS 9.10.

Users can download FreeNAS Corral at the company’s website or upgrade their 9.10.x systems in place by selecting the FreeNAS-Corral-Stable train from the update tab of the FreeNAS GUI or installing FreeNAS Corral from the ISO image and picking the option to install into a new Boot Environment.